Me and the sea - Conor Perls

I can’t remember what brought me here. To be honest, I don’t care to remember. All that matters is that I am sinking ever deeper, drifting further away. I don’t know where I’m going either, but even if I did it wouldn’t make a difference. I can’t change it, so I might as well save the energy that could be spent thinking about it. I do remember the beginning of here, whatever here is, whatever the beginning was. I remember the waves, something odd about the waves, yes. What was it? Maybe I don’t remember.

 

It felt so familiar, not déjà vu, more déjà entendu. That soft lapping back and forth – if I closed my eyes – could have come at any time in my life, past, present, future; that melancholy drenched me, it has been soaking into my pores since I have existed, from a time before a ‘me’ was. Time here is wrong of course, for this piercing blandness belongs to a space much older than time. As long as it has existed, I have been here. Wherever here is. Something odd about the waves. I have to think back to the beach, you see, and I’m out of practice. The current brings me where I am required, and I am required to be totally present. The past is ignorant of the present as the present is ignorant of the past. I am required here, and I have not been allowed to recall.

 

So let me begin. The waves. So similar to the current. They too directed me. I was an orchestra, the waves my conductor. Ah yes. My conductor. When I was a child, I ran along the beach, my feet forcing their shape upon this behemoth as old as time. How naïve I was, impressing myself on a beast as great as this. This repels me now. My footprints created great works of art, the fluttering heart of a child extemporaneously expressed across this great blank canvass. How I wished my opus might remain, and the lengths I would go in constructing dams and dykes and ditches to ward off the coming tide. Only now can I hear the groans of the beach, the cries so elongated they stretch beyond time itself.

 

In the beginning, before I was a child but long after I ran along the beach as a child, the waves moved to a different set of rules. The motion was wrong. Wrong to me at least, for how I experienced the waves was all I knew, how could I be wrong. The waves were at fault. When I knew them, they danced with me, they chased me away – some days as far as the grassy dunes which punctuated the beach, the margin by which the beach defined itself. On other days the waves were more lethargic; these were the times I sat and admired them, gazed out to the sea as it peered back at me.

 

The beginning. They were different in the beginning. I had forgotten about the beach and the waves and the sea sometime between growing up and the beginning, though when I returned the sea made it clear that I had remained, ever-present. They were different then, the waves. They didn’t chase me in the beginning, though the rhythm and motion was the same as it always was. There was something odd about the waves. Instead they beckoned, their seductive pull drew me closer, in a way that they always had, though that was the first time I cared to notice.

 

There were no animals on the beach, you know. In fact, even if I strain my mind, I can’t recall there being any life at all. That’s odd, don’t you think? I haven’t thought about animals for a long time, but now that I am, it seems strange that the beach didn’t have any. Just me. Me and the beach. And now there are no animals here where I am, wherever here is, whatever ‘am’ is. But there’s no beach either. No grassy dunes to mark the end of there and the start of here, and no shoreline to mark the start of this and the end of that. Just me and the sea.

 

Me and the sea.