The In-Between

Life consists of the before and the after. There is nothing in-between.

In lighter days, I remember the sea with a fondness that can only be felt in hindsight. As a young girl, the taste of salt on my tongue and the fresh breeze stirred by the ocean reached me in a way that others could not. The freedom of the sand swelling into my toes and the excited shrieks of my brothers as they dove headlong into the frigid water. It was life. Amidst the fray, I would often take a moment to look towards Godrevy and wonder what tragedies it had interrupted. On darker days, when the clouds were tinged with a drab grey, I wondered more if those souls had been grateful for the intervention or if they resented it.

Childhood stretched out before me towards an horizon that grew from my dreams. The conversations, the endless opportunity to learn, to discover. The city gave my mind the freedom it needed to explore, but the sea, the sea gave my heart strength. There is something quite profound about seeing your space in the universe. Despite the dreams, the grandiose aspirations, the oceans and mountains of this life will endure long after we are food for worms.

My childhood was an expanse waiting to be filled. With my brothers I explored ideas with as much dedication and intensity as I combed the beaches of the weekends and holidays for the perfect shell. I yearned to find a conch. To hold it up to my ear and hear the secrets of the waves. Alas, I never did but the endless stretched out days of searching were enough to satisfy my innocent heart - to keep my dream alive.

And then it all changed. Utterly changed.

First Anabella, then my mother, my darling, beautiful mother, was the first to depart. After that, death seemed to follow me. How does one reconcile with such loss? The rooms of our increasingly crumbling townhouse became as empty and numb as my broken heart. At 13, I thought I was 30, but the truth is, I daresay, I was ill-equipped for such a sudden departure. Books teach you the words of grief, but they cannot give you the means to bear it. The audaciousness, the entirely unpredictable nature of it left us all in a state of suspended existence. Like soldiers returning from war, unable to unsee the truth. The violent arbitrariness of it all.

My father, for all his captivating intellect, could not prevent his own demise. The cancer ate away at his stomach and seeped into his mind. We watched in helpless ineptitude as he dwindled into the cracked shell of the man who had once enlivened drab literary events — brightening the room with his infectious enthusiasm for knowledge and understanding. There was certainly a death, but whose was hard to determine. I don’t know which is worse: the long battle towards an inevitable defeat or the short, sharp shock of loss. Either way, the emptiness had taken root in my mind and spirit.

Funerals are for the ones left behind, but in truth, they offer no solace to anyone. The dead remain, no matter how many times one says goodbye. The vacant space where their words should be grows into an infinite emptiness that can never be filled. Such is life, and such is death.

The befores and afters.

After the loss, we could  no longer bear the hollowness of that house. The rooms seemed to echo with desecration, a constant, unrelenting reminder that we were alone. We had inherited a sum. But what good is gold to an irrevocably damaged heart? We left to escape the silence, not to chase our dreams. For we all knew that dreams were as capricious as nightmares and loss.

“Time heals all,” they say, but as the losses piled up and my heart only felt the steady gaze of the dead and dying, my lungs choked on death.

Michael was too much. For months he had fought, but his lungs could not fend off the infection that attacked them.

I sank into myself, wishing only for the peace of the water; I do not remember anything of how I ended up there in St Martin’s. 

Only the before and the after.

At first, the asylum was worse than loss. It was a symbol of my own failure, my inability to follow through.

I met Clarissa there during my first week. She too had failed. We consoled each other silently on our collective ineptitude. They gave us pills and slowly we began to speak - hushed at first - as if voicing our pain would give rise into a betrayal that would compound the fear. 

Later, entirely against our better judgment, we began to trust in each other. Salvation. We sat on the edge of my bed and she would tell me of her controlling father and histrionic mother and I would speak of the loss. Some nights we would not speak at all, only hold each other in silence.

Later still, her hands would  stroke between my thighs, her lips brushing against my swollen cheeks. The sanctity of her midnight whisper. We had found each other. Out of desolation we began to see a crack of light in our dark earth.

The night before I was due to leave we made a pact that we would find a way to be together. She would come to live with me in a week. We would carve a life somehow.

And then it all changed. Utterly changed.

She held it out to me that night like an offering. She had asked her father to get it for me. She said, her voice an excited whisper.

“I love you”

I could barely bring myself to look at it. The pink underbelly, for all its smoothness, was insidious. Toxic.  It felt like temptation and manipulation. The sharp spikes of its back melded into the thorns by which I would die as I succumbed to her.

I took the conch from her outstretched  hands and held it up to my ear.

The swill of the ocean had been sacrificed to the screams of the insane and the pulsating dissonance of a sterile hospital. The sea crashed in around me and I drowned in the wailing grief of the loss I had known was inevitable.

We fucked that night. Numb with emptiness and needing only the violence of sex she took my vigour for gratitude.

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I can make out the lighthouse under the shards of the moon. The waves sweeping on to the shore bring me solace. I relax into the rhythm - listening to the dirge of my own funeral. 

I throw the tainted shell into the water. I had thought that she had understood. That we were the same.

I feel the weight of rocks, heavy in my pockets, and walk towards the water. Towards home.

Celia Underland x