The coast probably hasn’t looked like this in hundreds of years.

No one walking, no one sitting, no one swimming, no one surfing.

And it’s not a Christmas-morning ‘no one,’ when there’s ‘no one’ but me at the store picking up last-minute bacon.

This ‘no one’ is desolate. Beautiful waves pass through unridden and, having long since washed away the last human footprints on higher tides, now only sweep across grains of sand that were here long before us, and will be here long after we’re gone.

At first, these challenging times that forced us to separate actually seemed to connect us even more, in a unified front against an unknown enemy. As more data has been pooled and analyzed, and the enemy has become less unknown, we’ve begun to separate again.

We look for affirmation, not information, in times like these. We read (and write) stories that support and advance our narrative. No one is immune, myself included. Pun intended.

What we see is impossible to divorce from what we believe.

Except this.

The coast probably hasn’t looked like this in hundreds of years.