Colin tells me he surfs at night. I decide to go with him once, just to see what it's like, and because he doesn't ask me to.
I stand shivering in my one-piece bathing suit as he waxes up his board and straps on his leash. It is summer but the evening chills. I feel awkward, all skinny with tangled hair and no wetsuit.
You okay? he asks. I nod. I am thinking of the times I've asked him the same. His answer is never so simple.
We wade in together with our surfboards at our sides until we're thigh deep, then slide on and start paddling into darkness.
We're out in front of a restaurant, one of those fancy seafood joints where we would never go, and the lights dim quickly on the water. Colin is fluid as he dives beneath the waves and emerges through their smooth backs. It takes only a moment before he slips into the black beyond the breakers and I lose sight of his pale feet.
I struggle in the foam behind him, the frothy waves pulling my board up and back and pushing me off. The water pulses around me, thirsty for sacrifice.
When I finally make it out, Colin is there in the calm where the water is glassy and silent. A razor moon and tiny, blinking stars cast everything in black and white. Mostly black.
I can't see a thing, I whisper. How am I supposed to know when a wave's coming?
Colin shrugs.
You have to feel it, he says.
But I don't. Colin is getting the same left over and over again. He rides it halfway in and then paddles back out. I straddle my board, anxious until he glides up next to me.
We stay out for about an hour and then I decide it's time to go in. Colin has just caught another left and I want to wait until he makes his way back out.
The set comes without warning. The first wave is double overhead and I get over it just as it crashes. But the second is as solid as a barge, a charging wall of whitewater in the dark. I lose my balance and get pulled under, caught in my leash and arms flailing. The board tugs at my ankle in hard, hungry jerks. I turn in circles and lose my sense of up.
Then suddenly, swiftly, I feel myself begin to rise.
Surfacing, I scan the waves but there is no sign of Colin. I look for him in the peaks and falls, knowing he's gone, knowing I might have saved him but didn't.
But then the swell passes and there he is, bobbing in silence with his back to the shore and his shoulders hunched towards the open ocean, shrouded in night and waiting.
Jenny Williams is a UC Berkeley graduate turned folklore groupie and songwriter, recently returned from a two-year trip through the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Her work has appeared in Matador Travel, Pology, and Ethical Traveler.