I parked on the dirt track behind the shed and made my way down to the beach. The last few sunbathers were gathering up bags and towels and umbrellas and folding chairs, either getting ready for afternoon coffee at the little beachside spot, or heading home.
The owner was bent over the flower pots at the edge of the building, murmuring softly to his flowers, which carried a genuinely beautiful scent. He told me they were night-blooming flowers, and that they only release their fragrance late in the afternoon and into the night. They don’t really belong by the sea, he said, since they can’t take the salt, but he tends them constantly, watering and feeding them so they’ll hold up better. It struck me that these delicate flowers were adapting to a harsh place; his own gentleness, somehow, sat just as naturally alongside the roughness of his weathered face.
I walked barefoot into the sea, right where the waves break. I left behind the anxieties that melted like ice cream in the heat of the late afternoon. Even at that hour, the heat hesitated, in no hurry to leave. I felt light, unburdened, as if some giant hand had lifted a tonne of concrete off my shoulders.
Everything was strangely quiet. No one seemed to be in any rush; every living thing around me moved slowly and calmly, at ease; the people, the small and larger fish in the water a few metres out, the crabs, the ants, even the bees settling in for the night in the arms of the flowers.
For a moment, I let myself sink into something we all lose along the way: the carefree eternity of a single moment, the lingering, the brief pleasure of slowness. I knelt down and started digging a deep hole in the sand with my hands, trying to build it strong enough to hold against the water’s slow undoing. It took a while. I was drenched in sweat by the end of it.
I walked back towards the car park, glancing back at my short-lived creation with something like concern. I knew that sooner or later it would be swallowed up and vanish beneath the tide. But I’d had the chance to live its brief immortality.
By then night had fallen, and the air was thick with the scent of the night-blooming flowers. I could still smell it in the car the whole drive back to town, and it followed me all the way home. I kept it for myself like a beautiful secret, one of those things that arrive at dusk and vanish by dawn, leaving behind them the unforgettable scent of the night. The same thing the night-flowers leave behind, too.
