Zachary Lee

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East Surfer at Bay
A 1970’s Starbolt Surfboard.

A blue ocean foaming white at turning tides.

Zacary Lee’s dream.

First chances—they don’t last more than seconds. Zachary Lee was eight when he put his teetering, sand-speckled feet on his first surfboard. The shoreline waves-aquamarine and ticklishly cool-played with him, coming and going. Tossed and thrashed off the board, the sandy bottom met Zachary’s toppling body each time in recurrences that doubled and thrice tripled. But, the more days he ran head front with a board tossed around his arm, the less he met the sodden grounds of sand. Days became years, and as the water brung higher waves, the deeper the blues got. Vast became the ocean he had known, and now shamelessly shapeless, it bantered greater. Both grew, in a lorn sense, drowning each other with friendship tasting like seaweed and with love on board and wave.

End of time,

Moved away,

You would still find the ocean never left Zachary Lee.

Tan and tawny from the summery lust of the tangerine-tropical sun, Zachary Lee returns back for a new year at Silver Oak. With a day-break laugh and a perfect face akin to that of Grecian marble, it’s a try hard game not to sink deep into the sand. Those who know more, know Zachary Lee comes from the secular beach houses of the Atlantic coast carrying the water-hackling coldness of quick judgement that can become verbose. Clear skies and clear to see, Zachary Lee acts like all surfers on the rollering waves, superiority reining. With close friends and family, however, Lee is a boy of promise. Saturdays are his pool parties, catered with martinis with fresh citrus slices, and open bedrooms.

If the ocean never left Zachary Lee,

Neither did his mother,

Who stayed in his blue-green eyes.

Tagging after the end of his mother’s flying sun hat and joining his father’s open-grill on coals near riptides, Zachary Lee and his younger sister belonged to a family where a cardiologist put a ring on a downtown therapist. The couple had chosen a beach house with ocean views to pass the life that they missed from their medical schooling. Right and left, there was joy, but with joy, there came the raging  hurricane on the harbor. Sickeningly, it began when his mother began to return home late. His father and mother began shouting a couple weeks into this schedule, worst memories consulting after Zach’s sister asked their mom why the face of a certain patient and her were in a photo together in her purse. Then, after rain showers of betrayal, funneled winds, there came a night where his mother left her room empty of her possessions in the night.

Gone like a silent night after a monsoon.