Salt Air Opus

When Nate and I first began dating, he confessed to me that he had never seen the sea. I reassured him that if ever we took a holiday together, we would make it our solemn purpose to remedy that.
So, when the chance came, we traveled to Tianjin, a city we did not know that would later become our home for nearly a decade. We thought, in our naïveté, that reaching the shore would be the simplest of things. But nothing worth remembering ever comes without a tangle. We hired a driver, endured a long ride, only to discover the beach closed, locked away from us like some forbidden treasure. Worse still, our driver departed, leaving us stranded in a place far from any trace of civilization.
Most would have turned back, but we are nothing if not stubborn. We had come for the sea, and the sea we would have. Skirting the notice of the guards, we slipped toward a construction site, found a gap in the fence, and clambered through weeds taller than myself and rocks piled like barricades. At last, we reached the shore, wild and stony, but ours all the same. There we stood, the waves crashing against the rocks, the salt air sharp and lingering.