Ode to Brighton Beach and a New Friendship

Right now I am sitting in my purple-hued ceilinged room while staring at wooden panels older than the Depression-era house itself.
But I am not here.
I am eight hundred and six miles away, perched above a shoreline full of a people whose age is always visible only in their eyes, whose bodies feel no cold where they are now, whose candies have decorations of lobsters, polar bears, and lovers in recline. This place is a shore, somewhere between solid and liquid, somewhere between where I am now and where I want to be.
This place has food so thick your ribs expand by two inches after every meal, your mouth doesn’t even understand how to comprehend the warmth it can feel, your mind can often lose itself in Baltika and a special type of water known as vodka (only drank when eating so one can drink more).
O, klassno! This mysterious place has a magnetic hold on not only me but those that live there, those little Odessits, who roam the streets as if years did not exist except in the creases of skin on their faces. They seem so sharp, quick, cutting if you can not see past the surface but within the creases slumber memories of lives interrupted by terror, by suffering, by joys, by new and old. Even the young, whose exteriors seem like any other with hair that burns like sulfur and eyes that have known what lies in the older creases; they too have a particular magnetism. Even on the beach, a couple frolics in Siberian temperatures, splashing one another until the young man slings his arms around her from behind, winding his hands around her waist and resting his head along her collarbone only to say, “Let’s go home.”
I only have one concrete reminder of Brighton Beach with me, a small morsel of a memory wound in the lines of a clam shell. Each line holds an image: a set of eyes, bright blonde hair, velour track-suits, a flaky pastry, bins upon bins of various flavors of Turkish delights, hearty meals of soup and bread and that special water, sand under my fingernails, and a cold ocean nibbling at my feet. All of these things are wonderful on their own, that much is true. But honestly, they’re all wonderful because they happened on that day, in that month, and with me and you.