The drive to Sunrise Beach, MO was long and slow; Sara and I kept 70 to 75 on the gauge while listening to bad 60s. The scent of the lake house hit us as soon as we walked in the door, heavy and humid like a basement, but pleasantly warm, the single ceiling fan barely tossing the air. There's something so comfortable about old patterned carpets and scratched-up leather sofas, tumbleweed and stacked logs. Ultra-Hallmark in winter, I imagine, although you wouldn't want to be driving up and down these lakeside hills.
I've only been here once, but it feels familiar. Sara and I came here in 2022 when I was in a much different place in life, and I was thinking how much I love revisiting past vacation spots because it's like flipping open an old journal: remembering pictures, thoughts, feelings, an actual scorpion in the tub and the calmness of Sara's delivery: "Did you see the scorpion in the tub?" I remember who I was texting that trip and what I was wanting, or thinking I was wanting. I don't feel radically different than last time, not at all, but so much in my life has changed or is changing, and trips like this serve as nostalgia as much as they do preservation, time capsules of right now, who I am at this moment and where my life is going. What will I remember in two years, and write?
We spent the first night in the lake house, catching up on work, and I woke up the next morning around 7 with the morning sun flooding my room. I stayed in bed a while, then hung out on the dock and worked on a alligator design in Procreate, did some work, and soon it was already lunch. I sat out there with my legs unfurled, soaking in the rays, eating a PB&J and one salty chip at a time.
After lunch, we journeyed to Backwater Jacks, where we stayed almost exclusively on sun loungers in the water, sipping gin and tonics and deliciously people-watching. We ended up chatting most of the time with a group of coworkers/friends in their mid-forties and being equally astounded by an older man who said the most vulgar and problematic things really any of us had even heard. We learned the older man was a mortician in his former life, and that his wife (who apologized for her husband to us in a deep cigarette voice but was, according to someone in the group, "just as bad"), drove the hearse.
I also overheard one guy telling his group of friends that he was "married twice, the first time to a stripper he met in Vegas" so of course I listened in and heard how he was originally after the woman's "smoking hot" roommate, but how instead the woman and him stayed up all night drinking and all the bouncers knew her and let them in the clubs, and how their friends told them "by this point in your life I figured you'd either be married or --" and so they looked at each other and the woman was like, "wanna get married?" so they did the drive-thru wedding thing, the judge was going to deny them, but then the woman threw a fit and got the manager to sign off on it, and then they saw each other a few more times before annulling the marriage. This is the kind of LIFE that happens outside the house!
After our new friends left, they texted us "just joking, look to your right" and we realized they were still there, eating food at a table, so we waved to them a couple more times before heading to our favorite pizza place PAPPOS! We ordered a 12" green pepper and pepperoni pizza and despite it being "too small" in my hungry mind I couldn't finish the last piping hot oily slice, so the waitress took it away. Full and tired, we checked the time and decided we should go to the Strip because it was a Thursday and the night was young. We sat outside one of the two super popular bars and by 9:30 pm there was already a crowd of people dancing, all in their lower 20s. As I sipped my gin I thought about how women look so flawless at that age, and how Sara and I were once THEM, going out to clubs and dancing our hearts out. It wasn't really envy, just a sigh of the passage of time.
The way we were positioned outside made us look like bouncers for the club, since we took the two bar seats right at the entrance, which ended up being perfect for people-watching and, apparently, being watched. During the course of the night we ran into several people who all had different ways of telling us they'd been watching us at BJs, and the last two guys volunteered their plans for the next day and were like, "Do you have a boat? Do you WANT to have a boat?" Many people were genuinely shocked when we said we came from Nashville to here (because it's almost always the other way around) but had their theories ("Oh that makes sense, there's so many people there you just wanted to get away"; "Oh that makes sense, Nashville's like a 4:1 ratio right?"). We didn't really chat with anyone for longer than a few minutes--socializing in loud places has never been and never will be enjoyable for me--and we mostly people-watched or sort of danced to the BEST MUSIC, like really, the best pop/dance music from when we were in college plus some trashy club classics, and everyone was out there having a good time.
After Marty Byrde's we walked across the street and sat on a bench, watching drunk people pour into lifted trucks. An overly drunk woman plopped down next to us and was like, "My friends left me" and Sara was like, is it possible they just walked to the other bar? And she was like, "No, they're bitches" and then promptly apologized for bothering us and stumbled away.
We ended up driving home just after midnight, and I texted with Austin and then attempted to fall asleep around 2 am, but really tossed and turned for at least an hour and then got up freezing cold, had to get a blanket and socks and ate a snack, because even though I only had a total of like 2 drinks the whole night my body was definitely feeling the alcohol. Turns out Sara didn't sleep well either--something about being in new places with new noises and light and beds and pillows definitely makes for restless nights.
But man I've NEEDED this trip after all the ways I've been feeling in Nashville: stressed, detached, depressed. Feeling futile. Out here, that hasn't even crossed my mind. I've realized this is what I've been missing: connection to life outside my head. I feel like this is something that comes up time and time again in these posts, how observation helps anchor you to the present. So I'd say it's time to make some lunch and watch the boats go by.
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