longer.blue

Surfside Inn [This is the short story mentioned in the previous post, currently at 418,600 reads] Walking back from the beach was always quicker than going there. For years I would scan those assembled for my sister. It didn't occur to me until very recently that in my mind she never aged. Or that she would be wearing different colors. Or different clothes at all. I had been deposited on the sand finally, and she was nowhere to be seen. After hanging out by the hotel, I had just gone home. Even when she wasn't there in the morning, I didn't think anything of it. People meet, go to parties or rooms, lose track of time and responsibilities. Even when, days later, her boss at General Dollar called, all I had on deck as an answer was the equivalent of a shrug. I still live at the same place. It was cheap and still is. Spend most of my time on the screened-in porch reading, or walking the sand by the strip of hotels, fireworks exploding year-round above my head. There isn't any place else to go, or anything else to do. I don't register faces that aren't hers, or voices without her characteristic coda. It has been years, but I still scan the beachside for a woman she used to be, hoping one day I can go home and begin living again. There isn't anything else to do. [Being an empty vessel most often means cracks have formed over time. Thank you to everyone for reading. Your time is not taken for granted. Edit - March 1st, 2025 - I just noticed I have been awarded my 4th daily spotlight in 2 1/2 years. Many thankings to the staff of DA and whoever may have suggested this. This was written four days before my birthday in 2023, when I was living in an outdoor storage closet at a townhome being renovated in the Glen in Converse, Texas. I had lined it with moving blankets and about 150 square feet of sound absorbing foam to record what would become five albums - three spoken word and two music. I am still using the same laptop to record and write. All of my possessions still fit in one backpack and one soft-sided guitar bag. I had just enough room to lay down on the floor to sleep if I positioned things just right. I would later hear on the news that year was the second hottest ever recorded in human history. It is a not much veiled explanation of what I still suffer, often debilitatingly, from today - the disappearance of my fiancé and friend of 39 years after she tried to escape the white supremacist narcissistic abuser she was living with in Lake Orion, Michigan. Her name is Patricia Ann Roberts/Dumas/Coffey/Randle. She would be 57 now. It is her picture on my home landing page and what the bio and half of my works here are about. Surfside is the name of a town near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where my father was stationed at the Air Force base when I was in 1st - 4th grade. Fireworks were sold year-round and at least one beachside hotel was always hosting a display. This was in the early '80s. Reagan was president and I remember our school, Lakewood Elementary, having us students line up along the cinder block walls of the hallway with our heads covered with our hands for a nuclear war drill. The teachers were taking turns going outside and smoking cigarettes. All of the ninety tracks on those five albums play through to the end for preview on the Bandcamp site. Everything I have done in any medium is available for free download on the Internet Archive. There are 150 videos on my YouTube channel, including this one, which is a track on New Horizons Agency At Sea. I am on BlueSky if anyone wants to say hello. It has been six years since I last heard Patty's voice. It is still what I devote all day, every day to doing - making sure she is found, and justice is served. There is nothing else that matters or makes any sense.]