Going to the beach might only take a couple hours out of a day for a lot of us, but experiencing the beach is something else completely. Within its confines, we can experience a lack of stability that we find in our everyday lives, a haziness of boundaries, a sense of fluidity. As children, it’s magical. As young adults, it’s a return to childhood. We bake in the sun, and lie there motionless. We allow the incomprehensible chatter of the people around us to turn into wordless noise. We drift aimlessly in the water. We try to come back to the shore, and we’re amazed at how far we’ve drifted. We walk on terrain that moves and reshapes under our feet to get back to our towels. We totally forget what time it is. We remove our sunglasses and it takes our eyes a few minutes to adjust. When we get home we’re exhausted, but we’ve not really done anything. Appropriately, then, memories associated with the beach are hazy and ill-formed, similar to the recollections engendered by stumbling upon a long-lost snapshot.