is there anything as beautiful as words?

a draft of last beautiful by robert sloan...the link is
http://robinsloan.com/last-beautiful

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I rode my bike to the beach on the last of the beau­ti­ful days.

Timon had to lure me out of the house. As a rule I’m unim­pressed by the sun, and I have this the­ory that beau­ti­ful days are totally over­rated. We all go crazy when the clouds part and the ground shim­mers. Every­body gets dis­tracted and scram­bles out­side as if it’ll never be nice again.

I’m not cranky! I just have a deep faith in the future, you know? There are beau­ti­ful days behind us and beau­ti­ful days to come—so relax and play some video games.

But it turns out my faith was unfounded, because Sat­ur­day, March 27 was, in fact, the last beau­ti­ful day.

On Sun­day, the sky over the city was gray-​​​​green. Mon­day was worse, and the week that fol­lowed was a cage of dark clouds that trailed cur­tains of cold rain. There was light­ning. It went on like that, week after week, month after month, all across the city, the penin­sula, and the headlands—the sun sim­ply refused to shine. And today, about a mil­lion of us are still stuck liv­ing in a weather non sequitur.

Some­thing fun­da­men­tal has changed; some­thing impor­tant is broken.

But I’m not just talk­ing about the sky.


The thing that sucked about the last beau­ti­ful day was that I didn’t get to spend it with Kate Trudeau.

Back at the begin­ning I lied: it wasn’t Timon’s coax­ing, exactly, that got me out of the house. Rather, it was the under­stand­ing that Timon is friends with Lacey Pell, and Lacey is friends with Kate Trudeau, and Lacey was def­i­nitely com­ing, so Kate Trudeau was maybe com­ing. I mean, they’re really good friends. She was almost def­i­nitely coming.

If this sounds ridicu­lous, it’s because it is. But I’m in a quasi-​​anti-​​relationship with Kate Trudeau, which means that we made out twice, hooked up once, got angry at each other 1.5 times, and were cur­rently trav­el­ing through some sort of roman­tic nether­world. Don’t look back, Orpheus.

There’s a spot in Golden Gate Park where you’re cruis­ing down the green-​​cosseted road and you make a sharp turn—there’s a wind­mill on your right—and sud­denly, there’s the ocean, so big and bright it messes up the color bal­ance of your eyes. It’s wide and white and waves are crash­ing and you can’t believe it’s been there all this time. And, espe­cially if you are coast­ing towards the pos­si­bil­ity of Kate Trudeau, it feels like the newest, biggest, great­est thing in the world. Like: wow, who invented this, and why didn’t I know ’til now?

But Kate Trudeau did not in fact come, so I spent the whole day pre­tend­ing to be inter­ested in Lacey’s new job and play­ing quarter-​​hearted fris­bee with some dude named Chad. Really, I was barely there; my spirit was out can­vass­ing other beaches, other streets.