Sleeping Beaches

I was unsure of whether she was sleeping or not. My eyes were closed and I was listening for her movements on the pebbles. The unforgiving shuffle of stone colliding with one another underneath her. The silence was everything that we’d already said and were yet to say, and the tide lapped signifying time’s passing alongside us. Our bodies stationary within our timelines, looking back at everything that had bruised or moved us and gathering it all like a bag of groceries to be given out, one by one to the ocean. For her to decompose and engulf each memory and make it separate, make it something else that was no longer ours to carry. I couldn’t see her grocery bag, I couldn’t see her. My eyes were closed, and I was like breathing in the sun, into my chest, into my mouth so it could smile without anyone seeing it because for all I know, her eyes were closed to. Being joyful alone doesn’t often require smiling but I wasn’t alone. I was together alone, and if I needed someone to see my mouth curl up at it’s edges, I’d say, this is lovely, isn’t this lovely, but we knew it was. We’d driven listening to her playlist, of songs that she knew and I drove, with my eyes on the map and the road and my mirrors, but I was listening for her. I didn’t know whether she’d sleep in the car, I thought about whether she might want to sit in the back and curl up and I’d wake her up when we were there, like a kid being woken up and carried into the house. Sometimes I’d pretend to sleep, just so I was held. So I thought maybe that might happen but it didn’t. On the way back, she read the first chapter of her new book aloud to me and I listened, only sometimes stopping to listen to the map and even then the words combined to make a salad of sounds that I could differentiate each tiny moment to the next. I gathered tiny stones from the beach, because their colours complimented each other, at first I laid them out on my knee which was covered in salt from the chips so that they fitted together creating something akin to land mass over the ocean of my winter coat. But then I moved them so that the lightest ones crowned at that top, and warm tones of caramel and beetroot trickled in down to a stone with the face of the night sky, swinging like a ship in the night at the bottom. My knee has never looked so good. I gathered them together into my hand and inspected them further, seeing if I could pick a particular favourite that I might take home. There was one that slit open to reveal a glazing mustard colour underneath the brownish jacket of it’s shell, I thought maybe that one, and then realised I had to take them all home. When you haven’t been to the sea for a year, you must take all of the stones home with you to make up for the times that you didn’t. And also so I can take them back one day. Or place them somewhere else. Into the care of someone or something else. Somewhere that needs it. Somewhere that needs someone to look closely and say, hey, there’s something beautiful happening here. And it’s not your fault you can’t see it, you’re shrouded in a brownish jacket and these tiny crystals mean nothing to you right now. But I promise you, that one day you will, one day you will pick up a stone of the beach and say, hey, this one is beautiful, I’d like to share it, I’d like to put it somewhere that someone will appreciate.