She winced as she always did when her bare feet hit the rocky pavement after jumping down from the bed of her pickup truck. Paddleboard now laying flat in the bed beside her, she grabbed it and started towards the water. The smell of salt and sea drifted up from the bay as she walked towards the old docks at the end of her road. It was quiet. And to someone who wasn't from this area, who didn't grow up in the small coastal town just a two minute drive from the old marina, this much quiet would be concerning. But not to her. To her it was perfectly quiet, perfectly peaceful in an eerie yet serene way; the clink of the old sails hitting the sailboat masts that were tied up to the pilings beside her, the sound of the water lapping ever so gently against the wood of the dock. It was just past 5 in the morning and the world was her own. Her peaceful oasis away from work, away from worry. Here time seemed to slow down ever so slightly, and she always fell into a natural state of inner peace when the cool water finally touched her toes as they found their balance on the board beneath her. It always fascinated her that her best ideas came from this simple morning ritual. When she wanted an idea to grace her mind, her mind was nowhere to be found. But here, in the calm and quiet, this place where she thought of almost nothing (and certainly not of work), ideas would flow and sparks of creativity seemed to run through her body as if all inspiration came from the water beneath her. With each caress of the cold on her feet that water would flow a new idea into her. For this reason she always carried a small notebook in her waterproof fanny pack (how waterproof, exactly, she didn’t know know, and she hoped to not find out the hard way as it had been quite a few years since she fell off unintentionally) and would jot down her ideas in the still of the morning as they came to her. Something else she found fascinating was that if she did not write these ideas down, she almost never remembered them. It was like waking from a dream where you know you had an incredible experience, some otherworldly conversation or vision, but upon waking, you found that the thick of it, the facts of it, were vanished, and you could only remember the feeling it brought you. The rest is right there, so close you can almost touch it. But you will never really remember it, as hard as you try. That was what she always felt like when she returned from these trips to the middle of the foggy bay. So she would paddle out, drift, move, and feel the cool water beneath her feet. She would breathe in the salty sea air and look into the fog. And almost always, like clockwork, it would start to happen. And maybe it was said too gently before, maybe too simply. Maybe saying “she had good ideas when she was out here” was far too small of a way to put it. When she was out here, and the morning fog had not yet dissipated, she saw remarkable things. Not ideas really, not at all. She saw things – wild things and nautical things and things that seemed like things seen in a dream late at night but she was awake and she knew it, she was awake and she would think that her mind was just creative, always had been, and she would remember the monsters that would hide when her dad walked in, oh yes they would hide not gone just really good at hide and seek, and so was she, wasn’t she? Yes she was, she would hide and hide until the monsters went away, she would hide and when did she stop hiding? At some point the monsters seemed to stop visiting, just like that. There and gone, like their presence hadn’t had the effect they on her that they hoped it would, like they wanted to get across some point to her, something very important yet they could never seem to do it. They never spoke, she thought that they couldn’t speak even if they wanted to, they just gently visited and they scared her but didn’t they have kind eyes? Well yes, she thought, but she would hide anyway because they were monsters after all. Monsters that came at night when no one else was around. And was that not what she was trying to replicate in some way with this morning routine, this ritual? Because she loved him, she loved her partner of over seven years now and she loved rolling over in the night to see him there breathing softly beside her. And that was when, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it when he came along that it had stopped? The monsters, who had become a staple of her childhood nights after the sun set and the moon rose, didn’t they stop when he was there? Yeah, she guessed that was true. Years had passed, over seven years, since then. And in those years she had always rode out on her paddleboard, sometimes with him or her brother or her parents, but more commonly alone. But that one morning, about a year ago, when she first woke up before five, hours before her alarm was set to jolt her from her sleep, she woke up and stared at the ceiling in the dark, filled with an inexplicable longing to be on the water. So she had put her board in the truck and driven down to the dock, the air so filled with the mist and the fog that she could hardly see. She had paddled out and almost immediately the dreamlike state overtook her, and she felt like she was floating through the dreamscape land only entered when it’s three in the morning and the moon is somewhere above and you are sleeping the deepest sleep. She didn’t remember anything from that first morning. Are you sure? she would ask herself, Are you sure you remember nothing, nothing at all? Nothing big, too big? Nothing that reminded you of those monsters you saw as a child? But no, she didn’t remember a thing. All she knew was that in that moment she felt absolutely amazing. Better than she had in seven years maybe, maybe better than she had ever felt. She felt like she had slept the most restorative sleep after a rigorous exercise that left both her mind and body in a state of pure content. She always felt recharged and so ready for the day when she first pulled in after those morning paddles. The next part of her morning ritual, the part that was always a bit odd for her even after all this time, was the part after her board was safely in the bed and the key was in the ignition. She would take the notebook out from her waterproof fanny and look at what she had marked that day’s page with. Sometimes she found drawings, other times she found words. But no matter what, what she found was something that she did not remember writing down. She would nod and think about whatever it was, sometimes she would even use the ideas or sketches from this notebook in her professional work, turning a rough sketch or idea into a finished piece of art. These pieces were always the best received; people seemed to connect the most with them, and she always felt a little funny about that. Because really, where did these ideas come from? She really felt more like the messenger than the creator, the technician rather than the inventor. She never had a good answer to that age-old question of where she got her ideas from. But that was alright really, she never harped on it too much. She was content, and this feeling of content that came from her secret mornings on the bay were only furthered by turning those sketches and words with unknown origin into finished pieces. And so here she was again, back in the now, back in the fog, pushing through the dark water with her paddle, her mind everywhere and nowhere at once. She saw sea serpents and she saw gulls, she saw megalodons dancing out of the water and she saw small fish swimming beneath her board. The line between what was real and unreal, imagination and fact, was not just blurred but gone entirely. And that seemed not to matter in the least. She never over-thought this; she just observed, looking around at the nautical circus before her. And there was something so familiar about it all, always so familiar in these moments, have I seen their eyes before?, she would think, the almost kind eyes of a visitor from long ago, from a monster who seemed like they had something to say? She never had an answer. She would just watch, and sometimes she would sketch what she saw. Sometimes she felt small sparks of fear, but never for long. Because these things didn’t want to hurt her, she knew that. They wanted her to depict them, wasn’t that it? Yes, she would think, they want me to draw them! And the monster that wasn’t really a monster, that monster who visited me all those years ago, didn’t they want that too? Didn’t I know it even then, even without the visual language that I have now? Didnt they want me to tell their story, to document them and their goodness? Yes, she guessed that was it. It all came bellowing back like a flood, and her mind was suddenly the mind of that young child looking into the eyes of that thing, that thing that wasn’t a monster at all but a ghost, a ghost of the past, a ghost of all that once was, and all that is now lost. A ghost of an animal, a great animal. And there were many of them, weren’t there? Oh yes there were, and deep down didn’t she feel their goodness? She thought she did. As she was lost in this trance, lost in this unknown land, her paddleboard hit a small rock and the dreamland’s grip on her was slightly looser. She looked up and saw what she thought was a house, but the design wasn’t that of a usual house. It was triangular, almost pyramidal, not like any house she ever saw. What’s more this structure that both looked and didn’t look like a house had a light, a strong light at the peak of its pyramidal form, a light that sliced through the fog like the bow of a ship slices through the churning sea, both in chaos and with grace. There in front of her again was one of those lost ones, one of those ghosts of the past. It served as a guardian of this unusual lighthouse, a guardian who protected the light so that it could cut through that thick fog. And somehow she knew that the light itself was a ghost, and that this creature, this very old creature, protected it from being lost. It wanted her to document him, but it also wanted her to document his beloved light, his beloved light that she knew kept him comfort through the dark nights and the fog. She knew this because usually it was just creatures, just things with souls that once walked the earth that she saw during those early mornings on the bay, but here she saw not just the guardian but the structure it guarded as well. And why couldn’t places have souls, too? Souls that go on long after they are torn down, long after they have fallen. For maybe their light goes on, just like the light of their guardians, to guide the lost ones through worlds that the living couldn’t always see, the world that was always there, shimmering right behind the fog. And maybe they weren’t there at all, maybe illusions, illustrations of the mind that were amplified in the haze against the dark silent water. But maybe they were there, wanting to be remembered for all they once stood for. Taking a stand against the darkness, taking a stand against the persuasive power time had of making us forget. Pushing back against the fog that clouds our minds as time marches on, fighting hard to be recreated even if it was only in the artwork that perhaps no one would even care about. But in the rare cases that someone did care, that someone walked in and was stopped in their tracks by a piece of art, that someone would take the time to look up who and what this long-extinct creature was, that someone would be enchanted by a place that long since crumbled to the ground, a place that refused to give up its soul, that refused to five up its light. Maybe that was the hope that these creatures had. And so she would stare at that ghostly guardian, sketching what was before her as she always did. She knew she would not remember this moment, but she would remember the feeling she had on this morning, just like the others she would remember that it felt important to get this out, to get this onto paper. It felt important because she was not drawing her own ideas, she was simply the messenger in an age that forgot so much of the past. She was a documentor, a translator. With the guardian she would draw the lighthouse, that funny pyramid of a lighthouse. She knew that someday, someone would show her a picture of this lighthouse that she drew, asking if it was her inspiration for the piece. If only it were that simple, she would think. She would look at that picture of the Gull Rocks Lighthouse and when she tried to research it later sh knew that she would find those haunting red words, PERMANENTLY CLOSED, at the top of her search results. And that is okay, she thought. That is okay. For though neither the structure nor its guardian existed in her world anymore, the mark of its existence remains, and one only needs to know how to look through that dense morning fog to find it.