u/cheezits1776

I’m a surfer and I’ve been surfing the same surf break for several years now so I’m used to seeing familiar faces and people coming and going. One girl started showing regularly about a year or so ago. I always ended up parking right next to her. I didn’t interact with her much but she was very friendly when I did.
Last December, I got stung by a stingray and she came up and offered me hot water she had to help ease the pain in my foot, which I remember being so grateful for.

Well, a few days ago, I saw a news post on instagram saying that a body that washed ashore about a week ago had been identified as (girls name) and it showed pictures of her face from when she was in college. I couldn’t believe my eyes. At this point I didn’t even know she was missing so this was completely jarring news.

The next slide in the Instagram post was a hazy video of a surfer in the water walking in towards the shore while pulling the body behind him that was floating just on the surface. Lifeguards ran out to help him and loaded the body onto a backboard. They carried the body into the shore, right in front of where the person recording the video was. They gently laid the body onto the ground.

Her body was face down, pale, extremely bloated, entangled with ropes of kelp and seaweed, and her legs looked very boney/decomposed and looked as though a marine animal had been eating the meat off of them. You could see her blonde hair, bunched up with kelp tangled in it.

This imagery has rattled me to my core. The person I had just seen a few weeks prior, alive and breathing, was now the same unconscious decomposed corpse I was looking at on my phone screen. It’s affected my appetite and I constantly have this strange uneasy, morbid feeling of dread. I’m sure I’ll feel better soon but I just have to get this off my chest