The steel drums playing by the hotel pool blared like a carnival for the tourists wrangling kids and ordering drinks as they adjusted their uncomfortable new bathing suits.
Here, though, over the dunes and down the beach a hundred yards away, the drums faded into the faint, soothing tones of wind chimes.
Good, Paul thought, giving his arms a stretch above his head and settling back into his chaise on the sand. Peaceful wind chimes. Now don’t forget to breathe.
The ocean was calm today. Paul looked across the sand and watched the waves roll in and then recede. He turned their motions into a breathing game, something his therapist back home suggested as a way to center himself.
Paul inhaled slowly, as the water swept up the sand. He counted, silently. One, two, three, four. He exhaled, as the water pulled back again. One, two, three, four.
How many days had he been here, Paul wondered, and then he pushed his mental calendar away, reminding himself that, just once and at long last, he would allow the days to keep time for themselves, moving from day into night into day, without an agenda.
Agenda. That was a word he wanted to escape. There would be a list of them, if he bothered to make one, with words like schedule and plenary on it, but he most definitely avoided making one. Still, words like those stubbornly stayed within reach, hovering.
Paul would need to break a lot of old habits. It would not come easily, after so long.
One, two, three, four.
When Paul arrived at the hotel he had walked past a ballroom and instinctively wondered about its seating capacity. The bag he pulled behind him was just that, a single suitcase that rolled easily now that it was relieved of the weight of planning materials and backup laptops and semi-formal outfits for each day of a conference.
There it was, another word from his work life, intruding, hovering.
Paul glanced behind him, toward a barren tiki bar on the dunes, mercifully quiet in the afternoon heat. A lone server wiped glasses. Most of the crowd was glued to the pool scene. Only a few solitary loungers dotted the beach area they shared with others seeking the soothing waves and a little privacy.
Paul found the very idea of seeking privacy, at this stage of his life, grandly ironic. He had spent decades in front of microphones, sometimes bullhorns, rendering pleas for compassion or social justice, delivered in board rooms and before congressional committees and at glitzy fundraisers. Privacy was never the point. The message was always deeply personal. The more personal, the better.
So, Paul talked and talked, very publicly yet intimately, about love and loss and hope and service. For forty years. There were no guard rails dividing personal and private. It was a crowded two-lane speedway of community work and personal grief and smiles for the camera and then moments, far too few and hidden from view, of crippling anguish.
Paul forced his attention back on the shoreline. Breathe, he reminded himself.
One, two, three, four.
The waves performed their eternal duty, surging hypnotically, unencumbered by any human concerns lining its shore.
The work was good, Paul thought. Everything is okay, right now, here.
Paul allowed his mind to wander to his career and then, in an indulgence he very rarely allowed, to his legacy. The accomplishments of the movement in which he played a lead role, the political and cultural leaders he had served alongside, the generations of advocates who told him how much his guidance had meant to them.
The catalogue of accomplishments always veered inward, ultimately, toward memories no one else had seen, to which Paul was the lone witness.
Such as Paul, sitting at Michael’s bedside, as the machines keeping his friend alive were turned off, their pumps and beeps abruptly ending and, in the stark silence that followed, a single tear rolling down Michael’s face as he reached his end, too.
It was some time later, Paul wasn’t even sure how long, that he shook himself from his emotional retrospection and found the shoreline again.
One, two, three, four.
The whole idea of a legacy felt ludicrous out here anyway, Paul mused. It was hard to lay back on a distant beach and think about “legacy” seriously. Hard, in any case, to have considered it at all during all those years he invested, living it in real time. Maybe the point wasn’t the legacy at all, not today, out here basking in the tropical sun. Life and nature carry on. Lines in the sand always wash away.
A plastic lounge chair nearby squeaked with movement. Paul turned to see a new figure on the beach several feet away, settling in and adjusting a towel beneath him striped with gay flag colors.
Images of pride events, parades, with marchers holding “We Are Everywhere!” signs flashed across Paul’s mind. Yes we are, Paul thought, even here, in the middle of nowhere.
After a few minutes, Paul glanced over again, a bit furtively this time, but the glare of the sun blocked his view. He squinted, then finally shaded his eyes with his hand, and then there was the man in the recliner. Staring back at him.
Startled, Paul fumbled for his phone, embarrassed, trying to look engaged with something, anything, else, until he realized he left the phone back in the room as part of his commitment to unplug. He collected himself, stood up, and strolled as casually as possible to the tiki bar.
The server offered a grin to Paul as he watched him approach. Maybe he had witnessed the awkward interaction.
“Something cheerful, please,” Paul ordered. He stood ramrod straight at the bar, not daring to look behind. His back prickled from eyes that may or may not have been trained on him. He tried to chalk up his warm flush to the heat of the day.
The server produced a tall drink crowned with a paper umbrella that looked like a colorful hat. “Would you like two of these?” the server asked, feigning innocence and keeping his eyes on Paul. He had seen.
The corners of Paul’s mouth lifted ever so slightly. It was the very promising beginning of a smile.
At the shore, the waves continued their ritual, washing back and forth, with no one there to count them.
Mark
(Paul Kawata has retired after four decades of service to the community as Director of NMAC. He has been candid about the trauma the last year has created for all of those who care about public health and the dismantling of HIV services and research. “I need a minimum of six months on a beach,” he told me in an interview for POZ Magazine. This fictional essay is both my tribute and my wish for him.)
