Here's what I learned when I lived in a motel in that seaside town:

1. It's lonely in winter when the tourists are away, but lonelier in summer when they are there.

2. In those summers, tourists arrived in trim bodies, smelling of suntan oil and sweat and salt water, wearing white skin and regretting it. They carried towels in wicker bags, a novel poking out. Their pale ankles padded by in flip-flops, and they wore large dark shades like insect eyes. We called them 'bennies.' I don't know why. Maybe mountains had snow bunnies and we had sea bennies.

3. In winter, after they left, the bennies seemed like ghosts, as if they'd never been there, as if we'd imagined them to compensate for missing loves in our lives. When they left, they took everything, left not a trace. Everything about them and their summer seemed footprints in sand, washed away by waves or wind.

4. If anything remained, it was their absence. Like walking into a home where you believed family would be waiting and instead finding your house empty: gone, all the laughter you expected; gone, the lasagna you figured would be in the oven. Or maybe it was like the room after a house fire: one wall collapsed, exposing the room to rain, and all that remained were black charred beams and silence.

5. Only it wasn't silent. The surf continued to pound, pound, pound, and through cold mist the year-round arcade sang electronic nothing into the boardwalk cracks. A distant thunderclap could be heard. A lonely Styrofoam cup flitted across wooden planks on its way to next summer.

6. I only ever fell in love with one benny, only once let the sea's romance beguile me. This means I was a model of restraint. Ghosts are easiest of all horrors to fall for, and their thirst for blood is greater than other monsters, zombies, vampires. They have no flesh; they have to start somewhere.

7. She was pretty and fifteen. She was there and gone in a week. We met twice. She never showed for our third scheduled meeting. All that winter, I walked the boardwalk hoping she'd return, hoping she'd know I would return to that spot every day. I sat on our bench looking at an empty sea, steel gray and angry with salt, hammering sand like a drunk carpenter who is frustrated with a nail that won't drive straight into the wood. She never returned. She went home. I was not home. Someone else was home. She took her place among the ghosts.

8. When the bennies returned the next year I no longer believed in ghosts. Or rather, I believed a ghost couldn't ever be anything but a ghost, a benny was always a benny. By the third year, I knew to look through them and they did likewise to me.

9. The ocean, the thing that drew us all, raced toward us, then away, toward us, then away.