Even as our fingers neared each other, a frothy wave came crashing upon us, washing us through briny torture, separating us once again. Through the salt in my eyes, I could see Alfred staggering up out of the water, spluttering out, “Bertha!”
I would barely make it to my knees, cough the water out of my lungs, and lunge for him—only to be swept away for the hundredth time. Again and again, Alfred and I fought to reach one another. Again and again, we tumbled in the waves.
Had an observer—a prospective savior—happened upon us on that day at the beach in Oxnard, California, several years ago, he most likely would not have looked twice. He would have kept on, holding his fishing pole or the leash of his dog, and left us locked into a horrendous cycle of brackish ruin, making placid footprints in the damp sand on his way.
Poor doomed Alfred and Bertha.
Why on earth my brother Scott and I chose those names, I cannot say. What I remember to this day, however, is that those hours in the sun playing our self-invented game “Alfred and Bertha” were the most fun I had spent at the beach in (it seemed at the time) my whole life. Oh, how hilariously funny Scott and I were. How witty our games! How sophisticated our senses of humor!
If only we had known what real torture was only hours away, waiting to seize us with true agony.
That night was the fatal night. July 12, 2004.
Like a bottle cap blocks fizz from bubbling over, I wrote in my journal back then (at eleven years old, I was inordinately proud of my figurative language), something blocked our happiness by the end of the day.
We all have horrible sunburns.
The Sunburn I suffered over the next few days well deserved a capital s. Anguish burdens the word sunburn in my mind—because of that Sunburn.
Why do we call it sunburn? That wrathful blanket of searing torment that cuddles the shoulders and the back and refuses to be removed by any hand, no matter how skillful—it seems to me that sun terror or death by sun are better terms for the matter. (Actually, ultraviolet overexposure is pretty good, too.) But sunburn? How cursory, how incomplete, how trivial. No. The truth of the matter is that I almost died by Sunburn seven years ago.
(And Aloe Vera! That sniveling, sneering, lying messenger of false comfort, that bringer of icy stickiness that subsides into sickly warm slime—it doesn’t even deserve a paragraph in this blog.)
You ask, Dr. Montgomery, for a blog depicting something that stopped me in my tracks. In return, I give you the Sunburn.
First there was fun.
Then there was Sunburn.
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