Stone Skipping

|When someone you love dies, the last thing you heal from is guilt. The sense that you shouldn't carry on with your life, that you shouldn't feel joy again because it disrespects that person. That dear, dear someone who will no longer feel joy or walk on a beach or make plans. The thing is, healing is not the same as forgetting. You will never forget, but you will regrow skin. It may not feel like you're making a conscious choice to do so, but eventually you do. A thousand small choices in a thousand small ways.

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The car pulls up.

The wind is wild, booming and scratching against the windshield. The pebble beach slides into view as we park, the sea spread out like a shining ink stain, cliffs on either side and a bright, white sky closing at the horizon. The three of us get out and my hair is caught and blown awry. The Atlantic wind has familiar fists. I button up my jacket, tuck the ends of my hair under my armpits and walk out.

He follows, taller than most. He has a warm smile, which crinkles his eyes; my father.

‘I remember many a picnic happening here when you were just a mite,’ he says.

I force a smile and keep going, Jay and my father following, down the wooden steps, out onto the beach where the stones slide under our boots. I cross my arms over my chest as the past rears like a beast. Dad talks and in my silence Jay takes up the slack, noting his words with measured, polite murmurs. Jay doesn’t know why I’m silent, she’s just always polite.

There’s pain buttoned in my throat as I stare out to sea. Three years since I’ve seen this view; three years since I’ve seen Dad. This sight, like shards of glass in my flesh that I cannot speak of.

So I swallow it, detach.

Dad takes a picture of us for I am now a tourist here. I live across the sea, in a place of narrow streets and crumbling brick.

I play with a drawstring bag in my pocket and I resent Dad’s words. In the bag is a dried leaf, plucked from Adam’s grave, crushed nearly to dust by the miles it’s travelled and by my handling; blind me and Braille leaf.

A lot has happened since I last laid my hands on this warm beach.

I find a worry rock to flip in my hand, sea-coloured, smooth as skin, and for a time I can leave the Braille leaf alone. This place, stuck like uncomfortable mica in my body, scratching in between the years of my life, layer upon layer, and this rigorous cord of memory still sears at the lightest touch.

Adam died a young man and I aged in response. He always said he would take this trip with me, to the beach where I ate bananas as a baby strapped to Mom’s body or as a coltish child where I screeched at crabs between the rocks, a friend’s black dog by my side. The rocks look so small now and the dog is old and grey.

And now Dad’s off down the beach. I wonder if he’s travelling back in time too but somehow I doubt it. He is running his hands over mineral veins in the cliff.

Jay chases me with a bolt of seaweed, long as my arm, and I teach her how to skip stones as Dad once taught me. She is a good friend, a cool balm in unbearable heat.

Dad studies the geology of the cliffs and I study the ocean, the sleek waves drawing up a snarling lip, curling and crashing, scattering pebble, reaching clotted foam fingers out to me while a drum rattles in my chest.

My throat still aches and the sea wants me and I am afraid of it, afraid of going under, the salt in the water worming through my skin, streaming into my blood so that I am sea and the sea is me, bits of me flaking off, decomposing.

I imagine the ghosts of my past selves twirling and running, hampered by the stones as I am now. I am bleached hair and inked flesh, my outer shell changed and grown and whittled down and now it is not the usual nostalgia, no.

I have seen myself, my being unpeeled like an onion and a monster born in the core of me. Adam was too fevered for this world, so people said to me again and again, and his fever was part of what made me love him but the loss of him has dismembered me.

The sea is so big and the sight of it engulfs me, a place of stark decision. Of life and death. I do not know what to do. I am lost inside myself.

I see them, then. All my ghosts lying together in the shallows. They have linked their fingers and some are laughing and some are sleeping. I see Adam too, as opaque as the foam in the corners of the beach, like the dead mermaids in fairy tales. I can see the energy of him in his absence, my sweet, mad, soft friend.

I take the Braille leaf from its warm bag. It clings to its membrane, dry as paper, the colour of copper. My hand is sticky and I hold it like a sacred thing. I hold it and hold it and as the wind streams out so I let it go.

It dances a moment in the air, before hitting the curl of a wave. Drawn into the blue; gone.

The sea cannot have me yet for there is a life that unfolds at my feet and drags me from here, my birth-place and my death-place; compels me to grow and heal and love another and that is the pain that stifles me and the joy that saves me. The instinct to live, until the time comes when I am not afraid of that cold, cold final place and I can draw salty sea into my lungs and lie with you all in the water; to turn into ashes and bits of foam on a beach and be trampled upon by children.