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It's cold and then hot, and he's cold and then hot, and then cold again.The sun is on him, right on him, holding him steady as he sits on a mound of semi-damp sand. On a beach.He can't move his toes, but it doesn't stop him from watching them curl and uncurl in the sugary grains. Doesn't stop shaking fingers from grabbing fistfuls of the stuff and soaking his fingers into the heat of the earth.
Strange it would be a day like today, with the sun out. These kinds of things should only happen in the shade. In darkness. Life’s always better with a good distance to death. Avert the sun with gray clouds, turn its face back toward night sky until it’s over.Instead, laughter sings out, folks walk around in bikinis and shorts, barefoot in the sand, ready to play. No one a bit wiser to the cold winter streaking his heart as the sweat of an impending end clings to his hair and clothes.
He’d had big plans, too, hadn’t he?
When he looks just over his shoulder, there Joe sits, next to him, reaching toward his face with a balled up shirt that he dabs at Rizzo's temples and forehead. For just a second—just the sliver of a fingernail of time—there’s an undeniable
third rail kind of sadness in Joe's eyes. A realization jolting through him, though he won’t acknowledge it out loud.
What he does say out loud is said with one of those smiles that glows as big as the Miami sun: “Well, look who decided to join us.”Which is funny, because Rizzo’s been here the whole time, to his knowledge. Doesn’t remember not being here, at least. Doesn't remember leaving; therefore, couldn't remember making a return.He shivers. Embarrassing to be shivering in a Florida heat that he can’t even feel on his skin. Embarrassing more that he's here dying in a tropical print shirt. Can't die in a tropical print shirt. Still feels the cold steel and brick of New York shrouding him like an absent winter coat, the clouds in his eyes and icy concrete under his feet.He says nothing back. And Joe wraps an arm around him and pulls him close to his chest—so close that Rizzo can hear his heartbeat, and it’s alive, and Rizzo is jealous and ashamed and yearning for it. For life. For Joe.
No one is looking at them, he’s sure of it. Because Florida is a paradise, and no one cares about sadness and yearning in paradise. When he dies, and he’s sure of that, too, he wants to come back as Florida sand. Not sure how that works—the whole reincarnation thing—he’s been trying to figure it out, but he hopes he can switch out, or whatever, with the sand. Something that doesn’t go away so easily and blends in so well that the next time it’s time to go, there’s a billion options before it gets to him.
Rizzo closes his eyes to feel himself leave his body and blow in the wind. To heat the soles of someone’s feet and to get lost in the tide and the ebb of the ocean. To become sand.And there are his toes again, and his legs that he stands on—balls himself up into the softened edges of a speck of glass marble, and he can faintly hear Joe calling his name from a distance. Joe’s voice is somewhere far, far away—maybe deep in midnight in Alaska, maybe in-between the typed out lines of a magazine article in a Russian airport. Rizzo can barely hear Joe anymore until he can’t hear him at all. He’s sand after all. One in a billion flecks on the earth.
It’s so cold in Miami.