It had been a long time since I last went to the beach. Summer had already passed, and winter hadn’t arrived yet. The air was chilly enough to settle into my skin. Back in college, I used to visit this beach every summer. Swimsuit, float tube, sunglasses — I’d pack them all and rush down here, excited. I was seeing that same beach again for the first time in five years.
After I started working, I stopped thinking, “I want to go to the beach.” Maybe even the vibrant sunlight, the fresh sea breeze, and the warm sand had started to feel like work. If you walk along the shore, you have to brush sand off your shoes and cuffs. If you go in the water, you come back sticky with salt and have to hunt down a shower. Stay out in the sun for just an hour or two and you get freckles and uneven tan lines on your face. At some point, the beach stopped being fun.
I ended up coming back because of one sentence from a friend: “I just feel tight inside.” I’ve known her for ten years and always thought, How can someone be that steady? Unlike me — I swing up and down over small things — she always says, “That happens,” like it’s nothing. For someone like her to say she feels suffocated? I rented a car and we drove straight to the beach that weekend.
The beach wasn’t the energetic summer beach I remembered. It was quiet, calm — an autumn beach that suited her. We parked nearby and walked along the water. The waves went “shwaa, shwaa.” The ocean smell I’d forgotten rode the wind and brushed past my hair. The sand felt soft under each step, the kind of softness that makes you want to keep walking.
After maybe thirty minutes, my throat started to feel dry and the freshness of the ocean had mostly worn off. Then, like an oasis in the desert, a café appeared. The second-floor terrace was empty, so we went in and grabbed a table, thinking we could watch the water from there. I still like feeling the ocean directly — but honestly, I think I like sitting somewhere warm and looking at it even more now.
About an hour passed like that, just zoning out with an iced Americano in hand, watching the waves and the people who wandered down to the shore and then drifted back. Then we saw her: a woman in a bright red dress that didn’t match the ordinary gray mood of an autumn beach. The dress looked almost like a dancesport costume, or maybe something for a wedding photo shoot. Whatever it was, it was definitely not normal daywear. We’d been getting a little bored, and suddenly we had something to watch.
We started scanning around as if we’d made a bet: who can spot her camera crew first? Maybe they were filming from far away, so we checked both where she’d come from and the opposite direction. Nothing. No crew, no photographer. Was she maybe filming YouTube or TikTok with her phone? But she wasn’t holding anything. It was cold out, and her shoulders and arms were bare. Who on earth was she?
She walked along the beach the way we had, but with this loose, swaying motion, almost like she was dancing. She wasn’t even wearing shoes — she went right up to the edge of the water and splashed around. About ten meters away, a middle-aged couple in light padded jackets kept sneaking looks at her. So it wasn’t just us who thought she was unusual.
We watched her for another fifteen minutes. She didn’t seem cold at all. She just lingered in that same area, enjoying the beach. Eventually we lost interest and stood up, thinking, “Okay, maybe she’s just… a strange person.”
Life went back to normal for both of us after that. My friend, the one who said she felt suffocated, hasn’t really solved everything, but she’s working through it. For myself, the only difference is that I keep thinking about the woman in the red dress. Who was she, really — that woman in red walking toward the sea?
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