“The next night I went back to the sea dressed in 1950s silk travel scarves –
Paris with the Eiffel tower and ladies in hats and pink poodles,
Venice with bronze horses and gondoliers,
New York in celestial blue and silver.
I brought candles and lit the candles, all the candles,
in a circle around the lifeguard stand and put a tape in my boom box.
I came down the ramp with the sea lapping at my feet and the air like a scarf of warm silk
and the stars like my tiara.

And my angel was sitting there solemnly in the sand, sitting cross-legged like a buddha,
with sand freckling his brown limbs and he watched me the way no boy had ever watched me before,
with so much tenderness and also a tremendous sorrow,
which was what my dances were about just as much,
the sorrow of not being loved the way my womb, rocking emptily inside of me,
insisted I be loved,
the sorrow of never finding the thing I had been searching for.”

― Francesca Lia Block, Echo