It’s dawn on Miami Beach. The sun is rising without much pomp or circumstance, much as it does every day around here. The sand, still littered with last night’s seaweed from high tide and last night’s trash from high life, stands nearly empty of people, cool under my feet in the gray light.
There is an older woman, stocky and large of bosom, dressed in what must only be called a bathing ‘costume’, for she wears what appears to be a shapeless green and blue dress, thick black stockings, and a turban. Her movements are awkward in the shifting sand close to the constant rhythm of the waves. She sits down at the water’s edge and is surprised by a larger wave, a herald of the high tide that is coming.
Aside from the seagulls, there is one other person, a young guy, dressed in a black tank top with close cropped hair, who keeps, like me, taking snapshots of the horizon and gazing back at the boardwalk as if waiting for someone.
The night still hides in the hollows of all of yesterday’s footprints, purple and fighting the dawn, while the crests of the hollows become tinged with orange. The sky is painted the same color, as the sun plays coy for a few moments. At the horizon the clouds make cities with peak and towers against a blood red sky. In a moment, the blaze of the sun peeks over the edge and in a moment more, it sends its light in a fiery band across the waves to me, here with crossed legs and squinted eyes, trying to capture the beauty of something so mundane, but so exquisite.
How many sunrises must the world have seen by now, yet each one seems miraculous in and of itself, as if, in our hearts, we forget what the day is in the dark hours. But soon the dark will have nowhere to hide, not even in the hollows of footprints, as the sun makes it’s daily sojourn to the top of the dome of heaven.
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