Take me to The Rivah.

Spent a blissful 28 hours ushered into the little boho paradise out at The Rivah, where my best bud and her main man had been holed up for a week soaking up what I can only summate as some of the most beautiful acres of sand and water this country has to offer. Maybe some of the last stretch of coastline that feels like it’s got secrets. Because anyone who’s lived by the sea knows it can be as hard as it is beautiful.

We were sitting on the dock talking Wills and Kate. “I mean, if I was coming to the U.S. for the first time, I think the last place I’d go was L.A.” The world suddenly felt tiny. Global fame must feel bizarre. “Yes, wouldn’t you want to go see, like, New York City?”

Sort of hungover, lying on my back, wrapped in a towel—from my flaccid position at the edge of the dock—I said, “I don’t know… I bet they’d like Virginia.” A storm was flexing its smokey muscles, somersaulting over the water. Magazine pages whipped in the wind. There was talk of a retreat back up to the house. I saw lighting from behind my eyelids and seriously considered never leaving.

Today, I sat in the cool dark of the IMAX theater at the Science Museum a few blocks away. My hands remained on my eyeglasses the entire time; I went back and forth between wanting to see everything crystal clear, and wanting to have an unobstructed view of the sky blasted across the ceiling—images from the Hubble telescope confusing the living shit out of me, out of understanding how big (or small) the world I live in really is.

I mean, we’re tiny. And quick. A hand clap in a concert hall full of applauding, adoring fans.

All platitudes aside, doesn’t the fact that we’re a blip on the nowhere, timeless radar make you want to… I don’t know? Stop walking, bend down, grab a huge handful of dirt, and just grind it up in your fingers? And instead of wondering what it’s all for and why, maybe it’s just falling in love with the cycles.

So sitting in a lovely room, with windows and doors flung open to the decisions of the weather—a room that smelled like it belonged so completely to someone else, and all their someones before them—that’s what I want to take away.

Thanks for the escape, Nungs!

-C

And, from one of the greatest movies of all time, I give you:

The Commitments, “Take Me to the River”