Where the line ends

The park by the Mall is an easy place to be by yourself. I have a book and music is playing from inside my bag and it’s a soundtrack as I walk further from the roads. Music played that way can sometimes be a barrier when you’re walking. It is sometimes a closed door. But today it is a window. The squirrels in the park by the Mall scurry up to the people. Man and beast reach out with their hands and exchange nuts like coloured jewels. The squirrels’ feet are clasped around the railings and they push the nuts into their mouths and leap towards the pond with the firework fountain in its middle. The people are amused then and some of them point as the squirrels disappear behind green leaves, and some laugh and others put their hands into their pockets or into another hand. In time they all walk away, back to wherever it was they were going before. Some of them take photographs with their phones or with their cameras. One couple asks a passing man in a mackintosh to take a photograph of them both, the city behind an open fan. Their faces are the same, their features bobbing on the surface like a boat.  
If I had a coffee in my hand then I would know what to do with my hand, the one that isn’t holding my book. As it is, it languishes in my lap, turns pages when necessary, scratches at my face, pushes up my glasses. The palm settles facing upwards and then twists beneath my coat. It is restless and I think maybe that I am too.

Last night a boy in a club danced cartwheels with his arms and we drank beer and got pushed against one another in the crowd. The boy is different to me. He is easy and I am a difficult confusion of knots. He wasn’t wearing a hat but when I think about last night he is wearing a hat and it gets knocked to the floor by the people dancing. When I think about last night his eyes are closed and his mouth is turned upwards at the sides and we are two different people than we are but we are still two boys, in a crowd of dancing people with paint on their faces.  

I remember another boy then, one from my past who seemed easy but wasn’t. I think about a summer that in the wake of summers since has grown cold and ordinary. I think about my hand in his hair and it prickles now. It didn’t before but it prickles now. And another before him, as wet as paste in my memory. Time can often be cruel I suppose. It often dulls the shine of things that were once new.

I’ve become adept at projecting a personality onto a person I do not yet know. It is a way of saving time predominately. I can write the story of our life together through to its finishing point, and before we have said hello I am already leaving through the front door of the house we once shared, a final box of belongings in my arms (your blue tie, your grey t-shirt, that drawing of two coyotes or foxes or dogs you made on the plane; those things, that once stacked up upon one another build a life). It is childish to partake in such frivolity but I am a nervous adult who often needs the comfort of child’s play.   

I’m having a hard time not being in love then; or a harder time perhaps believing that it is a venture worth while. ‘Everything ends’ reads a note I found this morning in my phone as I skipped between my car and an appointment in a different town. I wonder what prompted such grandiose finality and the words become a tornado swirl of jumbled letters on the inside of my head. Everything is always ending I am realising now, but that in turn allows new things to begin. We each are forever starting over.     

I am on a train and it is dark and the train is empty except for me and the conductor. The conductor walks up and then down the aisle; his job to leave and then come back again, to constantly be between two places. In a different reality I would strike up a conversation with this man, who looks weary and ready to call it a night. In a different reality I would say to him that we were the same, him and I; both between places, both going and coming back again. If this had been a different train, and I had perhaps been a little less concerned of becoming the late night travelling cliché I have often been told that I am, I would have said something that would maybe have brought us both a little comfort on a cold Sunday in January.

The train pulls into the station and I get off. I am at home, where the line ends.  

When we go back to the sea

I found this. It is about the sea and some things that I remember. I wrote it in 2013 and today it appeared, shining like an emerald.

When we go back to the sea

I am sixteen and standing waist deep in the water. It is May but it is cold and the sky and the sea are the same colour and the line between them both is gone. She and him are there too; we are standing in a triangle, far enough away from each other that we have to shout to be heard. The wind is howling and she ties her hair up behind her head and tucks the hanging strands behind her ears. We can see the White Rock from where we’re standing, a row of shops selling spades and tee shirts and jobs.
“Ready” he shouts and she shouts “Ready” and I shout “Ready” and we all start to pee. We have finished our exams and we are free and we are tip toeing on the line between childhood and adulthood and he said we should go to the ocean and then someone said we should pee inside of it and we’re still young and the idea seems sort of a perfect way to start our new lives. We’ll be friends forever, I remember thinking, this means we’ll be friends forever.

I am twenty now. Or twenty-one. I have been sat in George Street for two hours nursing one hot chocolate that has gone cold and sort of separated. My legs hurt, the bottom of my back is beating, beating, I can feel each of my toes as if each is an arm. They are twitching. My heart is heavy inside my chest. I can feel it when I breathe. My neck is stiff as board, my eyes burn when I blink, when I close them. They are tired of crying. I am tired of crying. I am tired.
I write “I release my pain” onto a piece of paper torn out of an old book in my rucksack and I fold it five times between my fingers, there beside the water and the fishing boats covered in rope. The water laps over my feet and my shoes are wet and then my socks are wet and my fist is gripped around the piece of paper folded into the shape of a stone and I close my eyes and take a deep breath and then another and I can feel my heart and I whisper “I release my pain, I release my pain” and the sound gets caught up in the wind and takes off like a bird. I can hear its wings now, clapping like oars in the sky and I open my eyes because I think I might see it but it is only me, with my fist still clenched. I raise it up and throw the paper stone into the sea. It’s big enough to take on all of my hurting, I think. It is stronger than I am.

We have spent the night in the Old Town but with you it all seems new. I am late at first and you are waiting and you look as if you would wait for me forever so I slow down my walking because I want you to, but you see me and I stop because I am nervous. I am nervous under the weight of what this could be. I am nervous because I’ve forgotten how I would usually greet a person I am meeting for the first time. For a second I think I might call you champ but I don’t.
We laugh that night and I drink lemonade because my car is by the Crazy Golf and you say you want to go for a drive and I grab my keys and you try to change the music but I don’t like that so I turn it off. And you turn it on. And I laugh but it isn’t funny. We stop near the pier and you run across the road and I’m behind you, walking cautiously. It is dark and the sea is a still, black velvet blanket and the stones are just sounds under our feet. We walk beneath the scorched frame because you want to show me the silhouette made by the moon and it’s beautiful and I’m not scared though I hear people in the blackness. You put your arms around my shoulders and they are warm and porous and sip up my cold. You turn me and kiss me on my mouth and it feels new but entirely familiar and your hands are on my back now, holding me. Holding me up. Tonight is the beginning and the end but I don’t know that, not yet.

Rock-A-Nore is syrupy with sunshine and she is carrying my bags because the orange-red hair is blowing in my face and, for that day at least, I am somebody and I can’t carry my own bags. The sun is bright and everything is yellow, even the sea, and the sequins on the mermaid costume I am wearing glitter like a hundred tiny camera flashes. The yellow water crashes against rocks and I let myself think that the ocean is applauding me, and for a while I believe it. I sing out to King Triton and to the sky and she takes photos and I sing and I sing. Later the ocean, like a spilled drink, pours in all of a sudden and the rocks are bobbing like ice cubes in a glass. We grab at our things but the mermaid costume is tight around my legs and the water comes in. I imagine dying here. I imagine my father’s face when he discovers his youngest son dead on a beach dressed as a Princess. I imagine the front page of the newspaper, my spot on the local news. I hear the conversations in office staffrooms, in playgrounds, in churches. I imagine becoming an anecdote, an invisible victim, a “do you remember when…?”, I imagine dying before I’ve become anyone at all, before the town knows my name. I imagine being forgotten. The sun is shining amber and for a moment I am amber too and I disappear into the cliff. Into the sand. Into the water.

This town that is my soil

I was reminded of this thing that I wrote two years ago about Hastings. I never posted it on here and I'm not sure why. What I do know is that if you replace my age then (twenty six) with my age now (twenty eight) then the sentiment is pretty much the same, everything always comes back around.

This town that is my soil

I didn’t leave. I stayed and then my mind went to Europe and it went to Dorset and Japan and to your bed with the views of the school and the light that bled through the blind until it drowned us in that room, away from the beginning, from all of the beginnings. I stayed because I am not sure who I am without this place, the place that fed me and filled me up. Not sure who I am without everything that it took away, the people it stole, the days that I spent with them, without them, alone.
I sit on the edge of a cliff, in the concave of a rock that recognises my back; because I have been here before perhaps, once some time ago with him and a woman we both knew who was still a girl but not to us. I have been here over and over. A circle working its way to the top; and then down again. I have been here with the sand between my fingers and the sand beneath my nails. I have been here and my name is carved into the side of a rock beneath his and above hers, somewhere in the middle of it all.
The tide is heavy today and it looks like a tongue and the sky is the roof of a mouth and the town that seems so tiny now because I am twenty-six is going to be swallowed, I’m sure of it. I imagine it not being here. I imagine a hole in its place, a bite mark on a map, the concave of a rock that recognises my back and me, alone with a past that doesn’t exist anymore.
My grandmother didn’t grow up here. I don’t think she did. She grew her children here though, my mother, my aunt, my uncles. I’m chasing her down roads where their houses were once. I see her at the grocers, running around fishing huts, feeding ducks at the park. I find myself walking inside her footsteps and I never saw her feet and it’s all imaginary I guess. But perhaps she was here. Trying to get someplace else, constantly trying to go forward.
I imagine this town with hands that grab at me when I get to its corners. I imagine them around my waist and on my arms. Sometimes I wonder if they’re pulling me back or pushing me out. The arms of the person you love can change from pillows to rope in an instant. That is this town, I sometimes think; a comfort and an uncomfortable comfort.
I wonder if I am the best of myself with you, this town that is my soil. I wonder if I shrunk down so I could fit inside it still. I wonder if I kept my mouth shut for too long, if I was quiet and meek and let the changes happen to me when I should have been the change instead.
I am on the West Hill now and I am looking at the East Hill and an ice cream van is stuck like a sticker to its side and people run like ants and do cartwheels and I can hear them laughing and I’m really sure I can hear them laughing. I think about calling something out to them, something that might echo across to where they are. I think it should be my name at first and then I think it should be the names of my parents or the date when they met. I think about it but I never say it and the moon starts to steam up into the sky. An old fingerprint on glass. The houses beneath me, like boxes filled with things and stacked in piles, begin to light up and I start to see a pattern in the way the lights turn on although I know really that I don’t. More people coming home. Another day done. I am sitting on the grass, the grass that I ran across once on my way to the cliff, on my way to the sea, on my way down to start again at the beginning.
I look across at the pier, a charred skeleton balancing in grey, crashing waves. I think about what it was once, my cousin serving ice creams at its entrance and holidays and coin machines and chips. I imagine it having a heart inside that burnt frame. I think about it beating. I think about it beating.
I take my hand and place it over my eyes. I try to imagine myself someplace else. Europe, Dorset, Japan, your bed; but the town just won’t let go, its fingers pulling on my own, asking me to open up my eyes again.