BEB: The Strand

By Maddie Kearney

This is how June goes: fireflies cupped in sweaty hands. Naming the clouds that pass by the windows and over the itchy grass. Springsteen and static crackling through an old car radio and the windows rolled down. My cousins and I, sitting right along the shoreline where the lapsing of the waves covers the shush of the earth dissolving, so that you’d only notice if you dug your heels in. Watch the sunlight skimming off the seam, the bubbling of the sand crab burrows, the earth rushing to reform itself beneath the foam. I tracked my summers the same way, back then-- by the pulling back and resolving, the holophrasis of freckles and salt and sand and skin. If I close my eyes, you’re here too, your sandy, crooked fingers slotted between mine. At eight, the world gapes before you and you have no sense of it; you are small and tumbled and perfectly calibrated to standing on the brink. My body felt light, contingent, strung together by the days.

We played a game, the kind that only kids make up. Built a sandcastle as the tide was coming in, tried to build it tall enough to withstand the next wave. In no particular shape, with no particular design, just slogging and heaping wet sand on top, digging a moat to catch the water, watching the top layer wash away and cheering when we still had something left. Over and over, breathlessly, lungs and ligaments thrumming with it, always trying to beat the next wave. We named it after ourselves. MEGA. A gasp, a gap shored against my sunburned skin with frantic, eager hands and sand under my fingernails. A monument to the four of us that holds down one corner of the sky, that couldn’t withstand dissolution for five minutes, for three seconds.

At the end, we would go to the water to wash the sand out of our hair and ribs and the crooks of our elbows. The sun is sticky and sweet, running down the sides of my mouth like the inside of a peach. We suck the pulp from the stones and it sticks between our teeth. Grace, with zinc under her eyes, would tell us about the sea. Lie on your back, close your eyes. Panic brings lungs full of salt water, stinging in your eyes, tumbling. Just let it wash over you. Take a deep breath, go under. We bathe in the wavering light, salt stinging on our skin, and emerge hungry.

Eleven years later, in June, my grandmother passes away.

My hands have been shaking all summer. It is the first time in eleven years that we have not gone back to our beach. Instead, I am in North Carolina, alone. Every summer, there, the beaches have gotten more crowded, more clogged with tourists, more noise and fewer parking spaces. Not here. Here, on an overcast day, the sand is the softest I’ve ever felt and the quiet stretches for miles.

The water is warm, and for a moment my bones ache--crack, heave, sob-- for the bracing spray of high tide, stinging, waking me up. My grandmother used to say saltwater could heal anything, she used to bring jars of it from the beach. Maybe too much is changing too quickly. Maybe we couldn’t bear the same things when we all look so different.

This is quieter. I lay as if suspended, atop seagreen water, cupped in gentler hands beneath a slowly-greying sky. If I close my eyes, the world feels raw and new. My skin is sticky with coconut sunscreen and sweat and salt like nacre. There is nothing quieter. I could drift out, into the center of the world, and fall asleep.

I wonder if we knew something then that I have since forgotten. If there was something cleansing, unstudied, sure in sunburned hours, or if I’m only thinking this way now because I’m getting old and soppy in this water. I miss feeling light, dried by the sun, like I could blow away with the next breeze. I miss the only tangible things about me being sunburns and freckles.

I am tempted to say it’s harder to get back to that now, that I’m too tired to rebuild with the same zeal. Perhaps it’s an excuse. I miss how much I loved that sandy, messy heap, how much my heart pounded for it.

It’s June and its November and it’s April now, and I can’t remember that feeling any longer. My heart pounds and the room tilts, the ceiling leaks, stomach clenches with a sick, curling dread. Breathe. The water is seagreen and sinking. All monuments are temporary. Breathe again. Rebuild before the next wave. If you panic, you’ll tumble, you’ll end up with salt water in your lungs. Breathe again, and let yourself slip under. Breathe again. All this is about, is building your castle higher than the next wave.