Ventnor

It’s 8 January 2024 and today would have been Sharav’s 17th birthday, the first since he died last summer.

Almost half a year has passed. I’ve cleaned my apartment and rearranged the furniture, and I threw away some of Sharav’s things, but boxed up some others. I’ve still been taking walks around the neighborhood at the times that I used to walk with him, every morning and evening. I miss him all the time and still think about him every day.

I got out of the city for the first time in a while to spend a week and a half in my parents’ house by the beach while they’re on vacation. It’s so quiet here in the winter. The houses are mostly empty, a lot of stores and restaurants are closed and the rest are on reduced hours. Cars pass down the streets only occasionally.

The emptiness on my beach walks is surreal. My family used to come to this beach every summer until I was a teenager, and it was always teeming with college students on break, getting drunk, playing music and paddle ball, shouting and breaking beer bottles on the sidewalks at night. Walking on the edge of the surf, I pass one or two people per mile. A couple miles in the distance, I can see two elderly people with their dogs unleashed, running after each other, a Golden retriever and maybe a Pomeranian.

Sharav would have loved it here.