The sea, it has no memory

When he was younger his father went away. They told him he had gone to the seaside.

When he asked about his father’s return, they replied with broken sentences, half looks and second hand embraces. The life he had come home to that afternoon had altered, and nothing would be full again, whole again, and he could never comprehend how the sea could change something so absolutely.

He waited for his father’s return. Summer nights he would spend on the veranda, half sleeping, half expecting his father’s familiar form to return, dripping wet but whole, alive. Holding onto a vague expectancy that he would return, he would beg to go to the beach to look for him. He would stand, hour after hour staring into the mist and the foam and the salt, calling out, like one would cry out to a lost dog, searching the horizon for that distant shape of familiarity, the recognition of hope restored.

His mother found she could no longer look at him. In later years he knew it to be because they had the same eyes. The same smile. The same unconscious look of seeing through to ones soul. She couldn’t stand to see such a reminder of her failings in a shadow of the one she loved.

Again, he wondered how the sea could take something away from you like that.

I met him when I was nineteen. He was months older then I, but years so in his head. Built around the shell of a long faded past, he was melancholic, desperate for intimacy, a lonely soul. His life had never provided him with company. Tragedy had always been commonplace in his family and I knew almost nothing of what it felt like to know sorrow with such familiarity.

I had family in faraway places. The problem with dreamers is that they’re never happy with living a normal life. They had all chased and chased, becoming one with their futures. And I, I had fallen behind, the moment I had legs to stand on.

I asked him once, why the seaside?
He replied that the sea has no memory, that once you go in, you can forget forever.
And what if you don’t forget? What if you can’t forget? Some things stick around, like that stain you know will never leave.
‘You just do. You have to.’ he said to me, half whispering as we lay side by side in a bed big enough for three.
I looked at him. He lowered his eyes. ‘There are some things you just can’t see. Some things are just too much to know. Life sings too loudly, and you just have to close a few windows so you don’t fall over from the weight of it all.’

Even when he was in his dark place, he still managed to be poetic. That was one of the things I loved about him. He could find beauty in the most shadowy places, and bring it to light. I always thought that was how he found me.

He spent years staring out at the ocean, knowing that it was never the seaside to which his father left, but to somewhere much darker.

And in that lifetime of irrevocable loss, we each found understanding, comfort in each other’s company. Three souls, banding together against the wind, the rain and the snow.

His mother became my mother; they became the family I never knew. She’d travel halfway across the country to visit and we’d spend days sitting in silence, comfortable enough with each other’s presence to find no need for small talk. Three of us in a castle, a house too expansive. We only occupied four rooms between us, and the rest of the house breathed, whispering secrets amongst itself, knowing that we were too full of sorrow to listen, too lost in the broken, crumbling fortresses of our own hearts to care.

‘Last week I went to the store every day.’ I said to your mother when we, for a turn, visited her cottage by the sea. ‘Is that weird? I’d go there with a list of things, but just end up going through each aisle looking at all the different packaging, and leave with only a bag of carrots, or a carton of milk or something like that.’
We’d sit at the rickety table in her kitchen, looking everywhere but at each other, both as lost in our past as the other, while not drinking the tea in front of us.
‘It’s so hot!’ We’d exclaim, both partly conscious of the fact that neither had finished a cup since last April.
I picked at the tablecloth with burn marks all over it.
‘I tried to take up smoking again’ She mumbled, ‘you know, to help with the stress.’
I nodded, not really knowing what I was agreeing to.
‘I just can’t hold onto a cigarette. My hands shake and I drop them, each time. I can’t do it in public, and so I keep burning the table in here.’
‘So that’s why you put the cloth on?’
‘Yes. But I keep trying. I thought if I kept trying I wouldn’t drop them.’

I think we just needed something to hold onto.

That September I turned twenty one. The life inside me multiplied and I found myself with an appetite for more than just us. We celebrated with watered down juice and dry biscuits in the most extravagant glassware our crumbling house could provide. Eight months, two weeks and four days passed. Two hundred and sixty two days. Six thousand, two hundred and eighty eight hours.

I never told him that I could sing, a remnant from my brief family history. He found me one evening. I was home, I thought alone, washing dishes in our ancient kitchen, singing an old sincere gospel tune my mother used to sing.


Oh, come down to the water
To the water to pray
He’s callin’ you sinners and all ye in pain
He calls me to the water
Where the tears and the aches
Where the fretful find peace, the weary His face

Oh Holy, our Saviour
By the water you wait
Strippin’ of pride and strippin’ of hate
Oh, He calls me to the water
To the water to pray
By the water you dwell
By the water truth reigns


By the time I had realised he was home, he was sitting on our dining room table, shoes off, entranced. He asked me why I had never sung before.
‘I don’t know.’ I replied, amused at the attention. ‘I just never have had reason to before now.’

That summer it became like a game for us. I would sing a few lines and he would come racing in, where I would sombrely pretend that I had never sung and he that he’d never tried to catch me.

In June we became five. Our mother and we found reason to hold on, tiny pink hands and feet to tie ourselves to, to live for. July brought constant visits, famine and drought, and everything we owned was stretched to the limit.

He was at work, when his mother, our mother, on one of her increasing visits, began to speak of the seaside.
We sat in the aging kitchen of our ancient fortress, holding fast to the young life that her son and I had begat, and before I knew it, her grip began to slacken, slipping with each passing moment.
‘I never know what to do anymore. I can barely look at him, still. After all these years, I still see his father.’ She said to me, pulling at a napkin.
‘I don’t think you’ll ever stop seeing him, that’s the thing.’
‘I don’t know if I want to stop seeing him now’ she sighed. ‘Is that normal?’
I bit my lip, stirring more honey into the cup of tea I would never finish.
‘I just don’t know anymore. Life is just getting too heavy. The weight of it all, it’s crushing me slowly’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I just don’t know how long I can last.’
I shifted silently in my seat.
‘I see him everywhere, you know. It’s not healthy.’ She sighed, becoming more drawn with each breath. ‘When I close my eyes. When I wake up. On the backs of strangers. In cars, in sunsets, in moments we once shared, long before we knew sorrow. Long before I knew what it was like to live in an empty house.’
I put my hand on her knee. ‘You’re not alone. We’re with you.’

She put her hand to her mouth and looked away. A single tear fell past the barriers she had built, and in it held all the strings that would tie her to this life.

We were alone in that house after that. She had decided it was time to forget, time to be enveloped by time.

I never used to know what that meant. Not until She left, finding her seaside in the room with all the books, a bottle of tainted wine and the family album.