Personal Narrative-Creative Writing: A Day At The Beach

We hold umbrellas although it is not raining. The wind has picked up, forcing us to hold our hands on our hats so that they do not blow into the sand. The beach is wet, with puddles from the crashing waves up to the grass line. The cumulonimbus clouds hang heavy above us as if they await our departure to drop the remaining precipitation onto the beach. The water is calm. The waves are almost inaudible. The whole world is almost inaudible. There she stands. Her old blue dress. Her black shoes. Her red-ribboned white hat. Her dirty apron. She must have rushed here from the kitchen in which she works. Her purse lays in the sand behind her feet. She looks as stunning as she did the day we met on this beach. She was seventeen, I eighteen.

She was taken to the nearest hospital for treatment. Her friends ran after her. One stopped. She turned to me and said that the girl she was with wanted to PRATE with me since she first saw me that day. She was afraid. She never talks to boys. She hasn 't since she was young. She had had ERRONEOUS experiences before and never really had a boyfriend. But, when she saw me, she knew she wanted to talk to me. She said that my saving her might start something between us. That made me want to see her even more. Two days later, I went to the hospital closest to the beach. I asked if they had seen her. She had been discharged earlier that morning. I didn 't know where to go to find her or who I could ask. I had never seen her before. Her friends I had grown up going to school with, but her? Never. It wasn 't until school started back that I saw her again. She had moved here from a town an hour away from the one I lived in. One of the girls she was with at the beach, the one who stopped to talk to me, was her cousin. After her mother and father had been killed in a horrific accident, she had to move here to live with her aunt. This was her senior year of high school, as it was

And I obeyed. I walked until I saw her, standing there in the waves, an umbrella held tightly in her delicate hand. She is as beautiful now as she was the day she broke me. "Chey." I tried not to speak, but the name escaped my QUAKING lips. She turned to me, looking astonished. I wanted desperately to grab her. To kiss her. To beg her to love me once more. I couldn 't. I was still. I was unmoved. I could not help but wonder why she came here. But I knew. She came her for the reason I did. She wanted to come to the place where her happiness was left all those years ago. She wanted as desperately as I did to be happy once more. I began to walk to her, but the wind picked up more. Her hat began to fly away, although her hand moved to hold it still. Our umbrellas were dancing with the wind now, but all I could see was that dress. That beautiful red dress that hugged her as I had once in a forgotten time. The hair that looked so elegant, even as it began to fall with the heavy damp caused by the rain. Her bare feet that picked up sand and kicked it onto my shoes. Myself. The image of the man I once was.