Magnolia Beach

I hadn’t been to Magnolia Beach since I was about ten or eleven years old. And out of the blue, Wednesday, February 18th, today was the day to return.

It wasn’t somewhere I would have chosen on my own, but it was somewhere to go, so we made the hour-and-a-half drive.

Part of me didn’t want to go. That stretch of coastline is tied to a close relative I no longer wish to be connected with. Some places carry geography. Others carry people. Magnolia carries both.

I put up a tent near the water and sat there most of the day. The sky was gray. The air was still. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was quiet in the way open water can be.

I listened to Ozzy on the drive down.

My mom loved Ozzy. Lloyd loved Ozzy. Jesse and I used to sit in his bedroom and play Blizzard of Ozz over and over again while he pushed against whatever authority he felt pressing on him. I joined him in my own way.

Back then, Ozzy wasn’t just music. He was a headline too. The bat story. Biting off the head. That was part of the mythology that followed him everywhere, even while the songs were still just songs to us.

Lloyd once drove for Bill Ward of Black Sabbath, and we even went to school with his son Nigel. It never felt like celebrity proximity. It felt close in a human way, like the music wasn’t distant mythology but woven into real people we knew.

That era had a sound.

I was about seven years old, Pet Shop Boys playing “West End Girls” on the record player.
Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” coming on the radio if you waited long enough.
Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys” spinning on vinyl in the room.

I remember the weight of the record in my hands, the soft crackle before the music started, the needle dropping into place.

Those songs weren’t background noise. They were rooms. They were ages. They were versions of me.

I can still see my mother coding on a giant monitor, the screen black with green letters, locked into her own world, building something invisible.

Now they’re gone.

My mom is gone.
Lloyd is gone.
Jesse is gone.

And now Ozzy is gone too.

You don’t realize how much a soundtrack belongs to specific people until those people are no longer here. A song comes on, and the room rebuilds itself in your mind — the radio, the blanket on the couch, the house you lived in, the age you were when you first heard it.

Back then, you had to wait for songs. You listened through everything else and hoped the DJ wouldn’t talk over the intro. When it finally came on, it felt earned.

Sitting at Magnolia Beach decades later, I realized that the people who witnessed those versions of me are mostly gone. When someone dies, they don’t just take themselves with them. They take shared memory ownership. You become the last one holding certain rooms in place.

Ozzy’s voice still plays. The recordings are still there. But Ozzy is gone. And the ones who sang along with me in those moments aren’t here to hear it again.

That’s what set in that day.

Not the water. Not the gray sky.

The thinning.

The understanding that entire eras of your life can disappear while you are still standing in the present.

The ocean kept moving. It didn’t pause for nostalgia. It didn’t slow for grief.

It just kept going.

It was good getting out for a bit, even if the trip felt partial because of what that place represents. Micro trips help. They break the mundane and remind you there is more than routine. My mind is slowly coming back.

I know I need that full week in nature.

I didn’t make it to Goose Island like I planned. After calling to check rates, I think I’ll end up somewhere else.

Either way, the break is needed and happening.