The Yellow Robe (Part I), Faith

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment, 5 October 2005
"I felt the consecration of its loneliness." - from Jane Eyre

A ten-year old girl hooked her thick eye glasses over one of the metal spokes on the underside of the beach umbrella. She memorized the colors of her cousins’ bathing suits and ran after them towards the ocean. As always, her father had draped his screaming yellow beach robe over the top of the umbrella.

Moments later, after breaking through the white foam of a big wave, she realized that her cousins and their bathing suits had already melted into the folds of loud children playing and shouting in the ocean. She was alone.

Standing waist deep in the cool ocean water, hands shading her eyes, she searched the shoreline. All of the buildings behind the boardwalk looked pretty much the same – a stretch of white and pink rectangles and squares. She squinted and peered, looking for the beach umbrella that was draped with her father’s yellow beach robe.

“Where was it?” She had made a mental note of its location when her family had established a beach head that morning. Usually, that extra checking was enough to guide her. However, it didn’t look as if it would be enough this time. This time, she had lost track of her cousins, too

Hopefully, she thought that maybe they would lunge up out of the next wave. Then, she would recognize their shouts of glee and look in their direction and identify their colors.

But there were no familiar shouts of glee or familiar colors. With heart pounding, she covered her left eye – the weaker eye – to better focus. Her view changed from a complete blur of colors to a more focused blend, enough to allow her to distinguish individual colors. Out of the bewildering patchwork of a public beach, she was able to make out the screaming yellow smudge flagging her family’s location.

She was safe again, and no one would know that she ever felt otherwise.