OCEAN HAUNTING
Familiar laughs at the beach, high-pitched, mingling with the seagulls’ screeches. Skirt hems drenched in chilly salt. It was here that childhood was happy. She grew up with the waves – they were her tender companion all through the year, and she would halt, London roaring, and feel the water rushing through her with such force that she almost tumbled over. The vision died with childhood, and childhood died with mother, but the tide had remained, surging, flooding through her mind.
There she would find herself drawn back into the ocean. She would listen to the waves’ whisperings – these days they were soft, gentle brushstrokes through her hair, they answered her questions willingly, and they sung of the past accumulating, here, now, in the present. She could harness the tides, she was in command, she would let them play, pulling the tendrils of her mind with ease, she would work with them in unison.
Why did you do it? She would ask, and she would think of this one fantastic moment, and she would store it away to jot it down in a frenzy once the dinner plates had been cleared and the cigarettes smoked. But now, what exactly did you do? The conversation sped on, eyes sparkling, hands clutched in anticipation. She would have to know it all, come up with the explanation for the workings of the mind. She would find it in the depths of the sea, diving for pearls, still, with each seemingly last breath – it never was, she was carried along, ever further. Don’t you think it was rather like this...? she would place her elbows onto the table, lips curved into a euphoric smile.
During those gloomy mornings doubt crept in – could she do it? Perhaps it was all for nothing, she was deceiving herself, the pen slipped from her fingers onto the blank page. Waves clashing against the inside of her skull, droning. She had been asked how did you walk along that razor-edge without falling? For yet another time she had escaped then, had been able to hold balance. She could go on then. There were those moments demanding to be put into words, pulling at her sleeve, and she would surrender to them, hopeful, exuberant, treading along the stream, across the hills, into the oblivious distance. Hadn’t she found happiness in this small existence?
She was borne upon the waves, waking in the middle of the night, longing so desperately for death. How long must she still wait? A few years, perhaps. Yes, she would linger for another few years, she told herself, she would resist those lures of temptation, she would permit herself to dissolve within the melodious pools of her words with the ink splashing up her delicate, so breakable fingers, crumpled paper piling up in despair. Enduring. And then she might, within its wake, find content upon her journey, as flimsy as a moth’s wing, and she would feel the spring sun sneaking through her cotton blouse, and her mind would quicken for an instant with the prospect of yet another year.
Oh, what fun she would have! She would have people coming for tea, sitting in the garden they would submit to flights of the most diffuse fancy. Or someone, perhaps she that night, would preside over the dining table, and read a piece of biography. How old they had all become, now they could write about their querulous lives twenty years ago – now, she first had to take out her round spectacles to read, and she would do so in a deliberate fashion, and thus it became almost something that was essential to her persona, attached to her just as her hair and eyes had always been, as though nothing had changed at all, as though age was nothing she had to be affected by.
But then the world really was ending. They said it all, no hope left, gasoline stored safely away in the garage, for they had to be prepared. Now the sky was scarred by havoc, and she would imagine being torn to pieces, and hadn’t she wanted yet another few years? No quietude to be found in the fields, amongst the trees. What were the words worth in a world in which they were burned? With trembling limps she gazed upon the ocean, now the waves had withdrawn, curling ferociously along the horizon, but they did not dare to sweep back to the shore. The sand dried up where the waves had abandoned its unfailing breaths, anguished and exposed to the elements it lay there, suddenly all shelter had been robbed.
With each day, the world disintegrated further. The waves could carry her no longer. What life was there left to be had?
Having walked all this way, she gave herself up to the waves.
The waves broke on the shore.
Aglaja Miller, 21, Germany ✯ IG: @a_literary_residency