Does it make life more simple?

The space in the air was unripe. She wished she could let it inflate longer but her impatient nature overtook her again.

The consistency I mean. Doing this same thing every morning at roughly the same time. 

She examined the horizon in front of them. The tide was far out this morning, about 9 ft she guessed. A large portion of her life had been devoted to watching the tide and planning around it at times. In his 63 years, he had also watched many tides roll in and out but didn’t plan around them. Almost every 8.00 am for the past 15-odd years he had waded into the ocean at the top of Kitsilano Beach in a full winter wetsuit. From a thick black rucksack, he pulled out a towel, for the moment it was blue and white striped and slightly faded, and sat down close to the water’s edge. He dressed in his armour slowly but with ease. 

She thought that’s what might have at first drawn her attention. Usually, swimmers looked like energetic seal pups when putting on their neoprene suits. There was a lot of ungainly leaping, swift tugging of long tail-like zippers, and commiserating looks exchanged between each other or whoever passed by. 

His methodical approach was more akin to a monk putting on a cassock. For him, the rubber material seemed not to require dragging or pulling. It was a few weeks before she noticed that his left leg was prosthetic. She thought perhaps that’s why he wore the suit in the flush of the late July warmth. She wasn’t there every morning at that hour but enough that they both noticed each other as regulars to that space and time. The pace of his stroke was as methodical as his dressing, he carved the water out and swam past her roving eyeline. Sometimes, she saw him on his return, never in a rush.

Her face turned from the horizon to the compass of his. Deep lines were edged into a weathered skin tone, his white and grey beard not untidy but far from manicured. His eyes, slightly cloudy from cataracts were turned forward even as he packed the hood of his wetsuit into a plastic bag, the type grocery stores used to give out for free.

I don’t think of it that way. But perhaps? 

They talked every now and again. Just enough to count each other as a minor character in the cast of their lives. But welcome players. The type of brief interactions that lift, mirror a shared frequency, bypass BRAT summers, swelling of residual limbs, Magda Sabzo novels, a German Shepherd named Caesar, or unwelcome meetings about the use of ChatGPT. 

There was a time I couldn’t do this, maybe what was simple was deciding that when I could, I would. Some decisions in your life, maybe you’ve found this, they are simple to make. The other options, they fall away. But simple is maybe as fleeting as anything else. The aftermath or result of a simple decision is rarely that. Maybe you’ll find that to also be true or maybe you already have. 

His eyes shifted to his rucksack. She found herself standing and brushing sand from her damp legs. The time and space had closed for now. Life had to move forward, she had to wheel her bike and relock it to grab drip coffee. Towards the next. But she would tuck this exchange, this modest communion away for a later internal tribunal that was, as yet, unknown.