Many people would say she walked alone. Always a similar route,
the morning’s excitement perhaps diverting the foot over a different root. But
same old, they call it. Not that they know that each journey was fuelled by
individual narrative. After all, she would always diverge from the beaten
track and work her away down the gorse coated cliff-edge. The vegetation
could hardly be described as growing but more like ‘defending’ – liked the
bristles upon a pock-marked face, there seemed to be layer after layer of this
natural, narcissistic anger, and it filled her with a kind of triumph that her
own daily walk had started to wear patches, pathways even, in the gorse.
She told herself that it was otherwise unstopped, a sequence only her and the elements
witnessed.
Yet within herself she recognised that the more one treads
the path, the more likely other will be to follow it; even though this was the
path of desperation, of anguish and fear. The routes she wormed along sobbing
when she felt utterly distant.
She would work away through the gorse every afternoon, in
order to come out into what would be typically considered as an unimpressive cove. It was a cove of sorts,
but rather than the atypical arc so often laminated in holiday brochures,
it was like what constitutes a mouth
inside a shattered jaw. Raw and saturated
rock jutted into the sea at obscured angles, agitated by the endless
toil of waves. The sand seemed scattered
like a dead confetti at the oceans altar, as if committing the area to a kind of condemnation. It offered
both exposure and isolation.
Yet she thought this was an ideal, deserved
combination. After all, the sand never remembered
her footprints, writhing in the night under the cruelty of the winds.
Occasionally the seaweed spat up at her booted feet as she approached the
waters edge, feeling the enhanced sting of salt water on the skin of her face,
often already touched by gorse. The force of water would replace her angst for
a while, and she would smile, often cramming raw, cold food into her mouth – still
irritatingly conscious of the weight of domesticity on her back; cosmetics,
food, the rest.
‘Rest’ ultimately has two meanings, which in this reality
simmers down to one. It is attempting to condense the endless, all the
‘otherness’, down to a kind of relaxation . This may be exhibited by styling
the limbs or closing the eyes or smiling. But in reality the mind turns over
and over, like her hands did through the pebbles at the water’s edge. It was
strange that back in the place which would be called ‘inland’ she could sit in a library and sift
through friends on the internet, part of a kind of accordance. Yet here she was
not sure what her location constituted, not her interpretation, for she was
abstract, ostracised – the girl who would stare at rock, how every individual pebble
was amusing temporary guise, creased and corroded by water and time, fascinated
her.
Her hands had touched stone yet the body surrendered herself
every afternoon, as she would wade out into the fizz of water, walking to
hip-height. The final thrill of water over bone, almost as if begging to be folded
into flesh. The water both addressed sand undressed her, at last with something she felt intimate –
even the cold, liquid, lashing, turbulence, the flurry of rejection and
simultaneous acceptance, the sudden searing lightness of weight.
And always the weight, weight of memory, as she walked home.
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