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to the lonely sea and the sky // for Saoirse
July 7th, 2020
As the days grow almost warm enough to seem familiar, Anne finds herself more and more returning to the shore where she and Jack washed up so many months ago. It is a difficult thing, looking out over a horizon that once represented freedom and finding only the wall of a cage. She had thought it might get easier at some point, after so much time, but it hasn't.
The other difficulty is that the beaches have become crowded in ways she's never seen before. To these people, the sea is little more than an afternoon's diversion. A few times she's stalked the perimeter, just watching, all of it seeming so foreign to her: everyone in ridiculous little clothes, basking like animals in the sun, children shrieking with delight, scampering through the sand and splashing in the surf. It isn't that she doesn't recognize the appeal, especially when so much of the year here is spent bitter fucking cold; it's just that it's a world apart, a place where she doesn't fit. There's no room for her among all those happy people. In the end she always wanders further down the beach.
She's found a fairly reliable spot, at least, rockier and thus less appealing to those looking for fun. She hunkers down, half-hidden in a little outcropping, and sets her eyes on the impossible edge of the world. She stares at the line between ocean and sky for a long time, trying to empty herself. Too many thoughts lately, too little action to occupy her attention. Jack and Eliot, and the growing sense of being here as something interminable, all the things they left behind, the unfinished business and unspoken words. Max, still, and Greta.
Anne grunts softly as if to reject all that, and turns her eyes from the water, focusing instead on picking through the little lunch she packed herself, unaware for the moment how incautious she's become; too caught up in the small task and her own head to notice the approach of someone else.
As the days grow almost warm enough to seem familiar, Anne finds herself more and more returning to the shore where she and Jack washed up so many months ago. It is a difficult thing, looking out over a horizon that once represented freedom and finding only the wall of a cage. She had thought it might get easier at some point, after so much time, but it hasn't.
The other difficulty is that the beaches have become crowded in ways she's never seen before. To these people, the sea is little more than an afternoon's diversion. A few times she's stalked the perimeter, just watching, all of it seeming so foreign to her: everyone in ridiculous little clothes, basking like animals in the sun, children shrieking with delight, scampering through the sand and splashing in the surf. It isn't that she doesn't recognize the appeal, especially when so much of the year here is spent bitter fucking cold; it's just that it's a world apart, a place where she doesn't fit. There's no room for her among all those happy people. In the end she always wanders further down the beach.
She's found a fairly reliable spot, at least, rockier and thus less appealing to those looking for fun. She hunkers down, half-hidden in a little outcropping, and sets her eyes on the impossible edge of the world. She stares at the line between ocean and sky for a long time, trying to empty herself. Too many thoughts lately, too little action to occupy her attention. Jack and Eliot, and the growing sense of being here as something interminable, all the things they left behind, the unfinished business and unspoken words. Max, still, and Greta.
Anne grunts softly as if to reject all that, and turns her eyes from the water, focusing instead on picking through the little lunch she packed herself, unaware for the moment how incautious she's become; too caught up in the small task and her own head to notice the approach of someone else.
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Of course, she can imagine just as well how frightening the idea must be for Greta.
"You're important to her," she says after a moment. There's nothing stern about it; it's not as if she thinks Saoirse doesn't know that. It's just that: a fact, an observation, something that leaves Anne faintly wistful, as if nostalgic for something she never had, that is far, far beyond her now.