The Beach
Thursday came with the rain and I woke alone for another day at the factory. I wiped the cold from my eyes and stretched out of bed as the city mumbled to itself outside my window. The warmth of the shower brought the morning into focus and I was out the door to shuffle to the station through the crush of the drizzle before I knew it. There was this strange cold, all external. The skin felt it and reacted, but my inner workings, the raw, pink organs and the drip, drip bile, didn’t seem to notice.
The train slackened into the station and I found myself watching the other commuters pour into the doors before I joined them to veer in the direction of the industrial East. The rain didn’t stop. It had that far off static hiss against the window that stayed just on the periphery of my focus until, all at once, the sound got louder, more distinct, as though it’d had to raise its voice to say something important that I couldn’t understand. My head leant on the hazy glass. My ears throbbed with the engine, keenly, and I drifted to sleep with the green swerve of hills looming along outside, beside me.
By the time I woke, the train had brought me to the terminus of the Eastern coast, beyond the city. My stop was far behind, no trains home until the evening. Stranded. It was midday and overcast as I wound my way down the incline of the port. All roads faced out to the sea and I passed lobster traps, fishing nets, low, mossy walls, and gardens painted with the splash of flowers. The air was tighter there, and the salt spray of the ocean reached me just before I hit the pier, to see white sails skimming across my view in the distance.
I turned away from the port to walk along the base of a coastal cliff: a ruddy, iron-brown bluff that streamed in claggy tributaries down to the beach. The rain had stopped, and I could hear the sea swelling in its place. All day I searched for ammonite whorls and devil’s toenails in the limestone slabs. I cooled my feet in the shallow rock pools and watched the crabs skitter across the sands, leaving the lines of their spotty tracks behind them.
The desolation of that scarred coastline: its tufts of grass reaching skyward up along the length of the salt-sand bay; the heaps of stone from a recent rockslide, haphazard and briefly calamitous, but now so still; the cleaved earth facing out to sea. It was empty and sparse, and boundless. My soul could soar.
The sky held that lofty appearance of a mountain looming out above me, such that I felt like finding the foot of the precipice and taking the first steps up into that wispy, upturned bowl: reaching its inverted summit and looking back up at the Earth floating with the heavy grace of some strange cumulonimbus.
The clouds slid away through the afternoon until the night floated above. The open mouth of the sky yawned wide, its unquenchable teeth glistening in the empty dark beyond distances, vast and sublime. The crash of the waves foamed in a heaving rhythm and I felt the reverberating breath of the universe, crisp in my lungs. How long had I been afraid to look skywards? To stare, unblinking, at its silent immensity? How was night so alien to me through all the neon fluorescence of still rooms, porcelain and concrete? What was it that kept my eyes so squarely rooted to the floor? I laid my back against the incline of the beach and stared at the dusted marble of the eyeball moon, hanging, circular, in the socket of the sky. My mind emptied out into the salted air and my pulse beat steady against the shale beneath me.
When I walked back for the evening train, life lay before me like a beach full of shingle: each pebble cut from the rock and placed onto the sand by the pull of the waves, sculpted by the ever-beating tide, and distinct in its own quiet way amidst all the others.
