Beach, family, and a corpse

Date: 5/28/2020

I was at the beach with my family. The waves were huge, and I was out in the water with several of my young relatives, including Clara, a few other kids her age, and a couple of babies. Graham might have been there, but I don’t remember. There was a small island nearby with a hotel on it, and Clara asked if we could swim to it. I said yes and for some reason decided to bring along everyone, even the babies. We set out for the island. The waves only got bigger as we swam out. I was holding onto several babies and trying to make sure they didn’t drown, since only one was wearing floaties. Clara kept on urging us forward, and soon we came to a sandbar where the water was only a foot or two deep. I was glad to be able to rest my feet, but then I felt a glass brick in the sand. I pulled it out. Clara screamed that she had tripped over a dead body. I came over to her and saw the body of a young woman who looked like she had only died recently. She was African American, with medium-dark skin and an Afro, and she was wearing a hot pink bathing suit. In the sand next to her I found a notebook. I opened it and read it (it was completely legible, despite the fact that it was in the ocean). “El mar ganó, y la isla perdió. Yo soy la única persona de sobra en M———a, y en unos momentos yo tampoco no estaré aquí.” (Translation: the sea won, and the island lost. I am the only person left in M———a (I don’t remember the name of the island, but I remember that it started with M and ended with A), and in a few moments I won’t be here either). I realized that the island had been eroded by the ocean. This woman was probably the last one there to drown, and she had written this journal entry while standing on the last bit of high ground. l was sad, but an enormous wave crashed down on us and I figured we should probably get back to shore before one of us drowned. When we made it back, the tide was coming in and the beach was rapidly shrinking. The waves were still huge, and one nearly knocked out my family’s tent. My mom asked me to move it back, which I struggled to do since it normally takes multiple people. In the process, I dropped the glass brick, which I guess I had carried from the former island. I successfully moved the tent back to where the sand was dry, then went back to grab the glass brick. I felt like it was the least I could do for the dead woman on the island. It was half-buried in the sand when I retrieved it, but incredibly heavy (which explains why it wasn’t washed out to sea), and I dropped it several times before I finally got it back to the tent.