Jonas, pt. 1

He never considered himself a lonely person. There were moments when he felt alone, sure - however, more often than not, it was welcomed rather than shunned. He craved the wildness of withdrawal, the oneness of solidarity; it made him feel like a grain of sand on a vast, bone-white beach, where each speck was about as special, and separate, as the next.

Jonas would take the N or the L out to the Ocean beach to experience just that. He wasn't a very good driver, so he never had a car. He was twenty years old, car-less, a virtual nobody had this been suburbia. But it was San Francisco, and everything was good as long as it was green, and being environmentally conscious is a good excuse to cover up monetary struggle. He invested in a "Fast Pass," at least, something only the upwardly mobile public transportationers could afford.

The streetcar would always stop across the street from his destination, but the sand was already everywhere - under his shoes, crunching as he crossed the Great Highway. A chilly wind would whip up around him, the fabric of his black windbreaker shimmering with each gust. His walkman was busted - he had dropped it while trying to catch the train - so he couldn't listen to the tunes he had planned for the trip in the first place.

The beach rose like a sleeping beast before him as he steadily climbed the dunes towards his destination. Tall thickets of dune grasses like gnarled fingers welcomed him in, wrapping around him and whispering amongst themselves in the dry, cold air. Jonas' clothes were whipping around him so furiously at this point that the hood of his anorak stood at a complete ninety degree angle from the sand. His hair, which was just above his eyebrows now (much to his mother's chagrin), stood at the same angle but keep sweeping across his eyes.

As he approached the top of the dune, a little out of breath and completely enthralled with his arrival to the frontier of the Pacific, the mighty ocean lay before him like melted gold and copper. The sun was kissing the rim of the horizon and her long arms splayed out for thousands of miles in each direction, even towards Jonas, who welcomed it all and drank it in. Every second it grew darker and colder, but Jonas, at the peak of the dune that separated the natural world from the industrialized nightmare he longed to escape, did not care. If the sun were to sink into the ocean, to the bottom of the earth, creating a vast hole so deep and so hungry that it pulled in the entire world, he would be the first to run towards it, chasing the whales and the walruses without fear.