This piece is a contribution to the STSC Symposium, a monthly set-theme collaboration between STSC writers. The topic for this upcoming issue is “Beach.”
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The sea’s belly is regurgitated seasonally, and this is what we call a beach. A never-ending tidal turnover of sand and memory.
Sand isn’t defined by its material but instead by its size. So if the grain is small enough, sand can be anything from quartz and cliff to lava and fish shit. Beaches aren’t always sand tho, sometimes I’m told they’re cobble.
And yet we lay our bodies in the detritus and exfoliate our toes, trying to bury ourselves in its physics. It’s a place of joy and embrace. I think. Tho I’m not really sure as I’m a child of landlock. My experience of beaches by the sea is limited to two; one in California when I was a toddler and one in Florida while attending a wetland conference.
In California, I’m told by my mother, the beach was my realm more than the water. And I remain liminal to this day.
In Florida, I walked through the mangroves on an April morning to reach the beach as the sky turned grey. The entire stretch of sand was without people; it was just me. And then in the expanse under a sky that refused to rise, there was a sole wind surfer. He was defiant in his miniature verticality, and I wondered if he thought the same about me. I had never felt as connected to another human being as I did in that moment. But that was when a thick distance was what I needed to feel anything.
At our family’s cabin, the lake’s beach used to extend uninterrupted from water to door until a seawall was installed - a formidable 3 foot tall wall of wood that amputated the beach from its lake. When I was a kid, too fat to feel at ease in a bathing suit, I’d skip rocks instead of swim or ski. Searching for stones with fingers and feet is a calming practice broken only by the repetitive splash of the stones’ ongoing conflict with the water. Skipping stones requires no talking, so it was the only activity I enjoyed with my dad. Nothing shared but a congratulatory nod. To this day, he’s one of the best skippers, a trait of fatherhood if not fathering.
During lake days, as everyone else day drank and lounged on floaties, Juan would spend hours erecting rock structures along the seawall. His half-submerged body, a watery centaur erupting from the cove. By the time the grill turned on, the wall was crenelated by cairns. It didn’t occur to me until just now that the wall I used to loathe became Juan’s shelf of showpieces. Dad still shows me stones he pulls from the lakebed, believing they are the stones of Juan’s sculptures. The lake is giving back the past in act of mnemonic emesis, and the beach where we wait is misunderstood; what we thought was static is cyclical, and what we see as pristine is the slough of time.
So cool. Each paragraph is its own wave of memories washing up for sight to see.
Of course you'd characterize this as emesis 😂
Beautiful as always! Your use of language is fascinating