Peace

For the first time ever, Elaine Tracey felt a calmness, unlike anything else she’d ever known. Serenity. The kind of feeling that many millions of people spend their lives devoted to trying to find. Nirvana – a true state of inner peace. She opened her eyes to look around, finding herself on a beach. She’d been here before, hadn’t she? She didn’t recognise it in any physical sense but it felt familiar. She took a few steps forward, feeling the soft, warm grains of sand pass between her toes. She closed her eyes again, focusing on the feeling. Taking in the gentle sound of the ocean beside her.

The only way she could think of describing any of it was perfect. The weather, the beach, the ocean, the feeling of complete serenity and not a care or stress in the world. She had been scared before coming here. It was hard to remember that now, the feeling so distant from her current state but she was sure of it. Not just scared, terrified. She grounded herself in the sand and focused on trying to remember the moments that lead directly to this one. But it seemed that no matter how hard she tried, those memories were always just out of reach. She instead tried to remember further back, which she had no problem achieving.

So there she stood, in the middle of the perfect beach on a perfect day feeling as perfectly content as is humanly possible, reflecting back on her life. She starts at the beginning, a logical place for a logical woman like Elaine. Her earliest memory was watching television in her parents living room as a child. She can’t visualise what they’re watching but she can feel the warmth and love of her parents as they all gather around the television in the way families still do to his very day. She then moves forward, through her first-place prize at the junior mathematics competition and the first time a boy had a crush on her – Bobby Milligan, who stuck chewing gum in her hair. Aren’t boys impossible to understand? Even in her later years, Elaine could never understand a creature that displayed affection through torture.

Still she moved forwards through her memories, into her teenage years. Up flash images of truancy with friends. The kind of friends that you never see again once you turn sixteen and enter the real world. Perhaps once or twice whilst out and about in later years, brining little more than an awkward inquiry into what you’re doing these days and for women, how many children you currently have. But she wasn’t to know there fate at the time. She believed, as they all did, that their bond was truly unbreakable and would see them through into old age, rolling around a nursing home being the same rebellious crew as they had been through such a critical phase of development.

Onwards she ventured, through the day she first met her husband, Tom, who had been a butcher’s apprentice when they met. That was of course, until she suggested he found a new career, becoming quickly fed up with the stench of dead animals that clung to him after each working day. And so he kindly and accommodatingly switched to janitorial work at the local college, where he stayed until his body would no longer allow him to fulfil his duties.

Next came the birth of her children. Claire first, a relatively painless labour that lasted just a few hours. Then her youngest, Lucy. A stark contrast to the ease of her older sister’s entrance to the world. The labour lasted more than eighteen hours and Elaine could feel Lucy fighting her way out throughout the ordeal. It’s funny when she thinks of it, how their childhoods mirrored their births. After all, it was Claire who was the most troublesome. Particularly in her teenage years as it seemed to Elaine that her daughter was quite desperate to seek out and break just about every rule ever made. Lucy, on the other hand, was a quiet child. Not lonely though. She always had a plethora of friends that she rotated through, with an endless conveyor of faces turning up, wanting to be fed of an evening.

Elaine opened her eyes again, to soak in the wonderous views of this perfect place. Her memories kept on, despite her efforts to focus on the view. She didn’t mind though. It felt right. It felt natural. She visualised the girls lives, flashing before her own eyes. She remembers her childhood lasting an age but the girls were not girls for long. Soon they were women. With partners and children of their own. Claire married Steve, a financial advisor in a big company who earnt enough to take the whole family, Elaine included, on fancy holidays each year, to places just like the one she found herself in now. Lucy married Michelle and from the moment she saw them together Elaine felt as though each person had been only a half, waiting to find each other.

Elaine’s memories began to slow as they came to retirement just a few years before and the news of her illness. The doctors and nurses were wonderful. They made her incredibly proud of her decision to base the majority of her electoral votes on whichever party had the best track record in funding the public health sector.

As the memories she was witnessing moved from those that occurred years in the past, towards those that had occurred just moments in the past, Elaine looked out to the horizon, where two perfect shades of blue met in a feat of beauty. On that beautiful horizon, Elaine could make out a boat. It was a sailing boat. She couldn’t make out many features but it looked a pristine white, the kind of white Elaine had only ever seen in adverts for washing detergent. And as she noticed the boat, she felt warm. She felt relief, like a long journey was coming to an end and soon she would be home, where she could relax and be in peace.

The boat was too far off in the distance, hugging the edge of the Earth, for her to see anything. Somehow though, she knew what was aboard. She knew that her mother and father were on the boat. She knew that her childhood pet rabbit, Mr Brown, was on the boat. She didn’t know how she knew, but she just knew. She knew that everyone who had ever loved her and whom she had ever loved were aboard the boat, slowly making its way to her, for her to board and join them. She was so happy to see everyone again, that whilst she was enjoying what she had admitted was a perfect beach, she was so keen to board the boat that she had to momentarily fight the urge to leap in the water and swim just as fast as she could. But she knew they would arrive. She knew they would collect her in time. And safe in this knowledge, in this place, she was happy.