When Aria got out of the car, the long roar of the ocean greeted her. Like a breath, its exhalation pushed water up onto the shore and its inhalation pulled it back again. Aria suddenly understood why people made such a fuss about the ocean. Its beauty was free from the bondage of the words that one could use to describe it. Little birds bounced around in the white foam at the edge of the waves, sticking their beaks like sewing needles deep into the sand.

She had not imagined the ocean would have a smell, but it did. At first she thought it might be the smell of fish, but that wasn’t quite right. It was something else, something she had never smelled before. Maybe some ancient breeze of kelp and salt mixed equally. She searched the curve of the entire horizon, unable to find any land, and felt the power and vastness of the water, which seemed to have a consciousness in and of itself. It seemed to be alive. It was a power that could not be shouldered by coral or bone.

The breeze kicking up off of the water played with her hair. It seemed to move in slow motion. The allure it afforded her beauty was not lost on Omkar, who stopped unfolding the blanket for the picnic site in order to stare at her.

Aria rolled up her pants and walked into the surf. The water was a shock. The cold of it caused a dull ache to rise from the soles of her feet past her ankles. She giggled to feel the way the sand was pulled out from under her by each wave, making her legs sink deeper and deeper. The Pacific did not feel like a friendly, loving ocean. It felt wild and impassioned in its depth.

A pelican interrupted her congress with it. She looked up to watch it looming through the air. It looked like a feathered dinosaur that had been granted amnesty from extinction. It was unlike anything she had experienced in all her life.

“Hey, come over here,” Omkar called to her, not wanting to abandon their belongings on a public beach in order to join her. Aria walked back from wet to dry sand and sat opposite him in front of the picnic items he had taken great care to display before her. He had already opened a few Tupperware containers. They were filled with some kind of homemade food that Aria couldn’t recognize. There were two sodas, two bottles of water, a few rustic-looking slabs of bread wrapped in paper towel and a blue package of Oreos, waiting to be opened.

“Did you make this stuff?” Aria asked.