salt water (ii)
March 2021
Exactly one year ago today, I finished the first piece of writing that this site would ever see. Looking back on it now, I can highlight fresh mistakes and overly-wordy sentences in pretty much every paragraph — so while, back then, it was my proudest achievement, it sits somewhat lower on my list nowadays. Here, however, is a second rendition: the same story, retold. A boy, who drowns. Call it a progress report.
(Looking back at this in 2024 and thinking oh wow. This is rubbish. But I don’t like deleting things on this website so alas. It stays)
The sand is soft, under his feet. Achingly soft, in fact — another reminder, as cruel as it is delicate, that the world will cradle him right until it ends. A shadow framed by the light of the moon, a silhouette softened by the shift of the ocean, a boy suspended in sharp tandem between land and sea. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. It’s a sentiment which will haunt him, in these last few minutes, self-imposed grief which will take him by the throat and say but this is how it is.
An intermission, here, as his feet begin sinking entirely into the ground, a vague pinprick of realisation that this is where the ocean begins. Small waves, to start, lapping at the edges of his feet, washing his ankles gently of the residual sand. Wiping with a mother’s caress at his shins as he wades further in, salt water which crawls up his thighs until he’s stomach-deep and forgetting to register quite how cold it is, out on this beach.
The cliffs can only watch as he begins to paddle. The moon can only weep, as he begins to sink.
This should be it. This could be it, if that voice in the back of his head would just quiet itself for a minute as he pitches down into the depths that await him. Except — a leg, which kicks. An arm, which darts out to claw at a passing wave, a louder voice which begs him to swim up and away from the seabed. A prayer which will be answered if only by the boy, limbs twisting through the brine in this devastatingly human reaction to all that death can bring itself to be.
Perhaps, in a softer life than this, in a version of events which does not cart itself so determinedly onwards, there is a way of phrasing this which does not hit the boy directly in the chest. In this life, though, there is no euphemism.
He is drowning.
He is drowning, and this is a rather terrible time to realise that he doesn’t want to die.
In these last few moments, it’s not the water that finally does it for him; it’s the cold. The cold, which has bled all the energy from his body and contracted his muscles into a painful uselessness, no matter how hard he fights to keep himself above the surface. He’s strong, though, stronger than he’s been for months, now, and young enough to have a chance — but the water keeps coming, each sweep of the current seemingly larger than the last. It spins him around, topples him over, forces him deeper, down and down. Even when he can catch his breath — in the few, terrified seconds he manages to push his face into the air — he is shaking so badly that he can barely get half a lungful before he’s under again. It isn’t enough, grows less each time, and there is a terrible yearning in his chest as he aches, fruitlessly, for more. More air. More life.
More time.
He’s in full panic, now. Knows he’s drifted slightly too far into the depths of this ocean to make it back, icy current pulling him in further and further with every new tug, pushing him towards the seabed that he can’t bring himself to look down at, yet. Only up. He can only afford to look up. (But down here, where everything is dark and the sun is too far away to get a grasp on — where is up? Which direction was he ever heading in at all?)
He won’t be saved by chance, either. There are no beachcombers or tourists to dive in from the shoreline to save him, not this time of year, not in these freezing temperatures. It’s too late for him.
He will die — and he will die alone.
The sudden, gasping horror of knowing this makes him panic even more. He tries again to break the surface, not daring to think that it might be his last time, not daring to think much at all. He forces his legs to kick, forces his arms to heave himself upward, to at least get his body the right way round, to try and grasp another breath just inches away — and fails. The starburst shatter of his pulse against the ocean as he thrashes away from the seabed is almost enough to blind him, waves curling around the salt flats of his chest.
Then, without warning, the game that the sea seems to have been playing — this cruel game of keeping him so tantalisingly alive — that game seems to be over.
When he screams again, it’ll be for the last time.
A body, his body, trussed like salt to the sea, current taking him by the limbs and hurling him with impossible strength into the rocks that have awaited him since this night began.
The mindless intensity of the pain is so great that he calls out, mouth instantly filling again with freezing, grainy seawater. He coughs against it, but only drags more into his lungs. Curves into the pain in his chest, and the screaming that he doesn’t quite recognise — it’s emptying him, paralysing him completely. He’s unable to try and swim, now, unable to brace himself as the water keeps flooding in.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, he thinks again, and these white pinwheels of agony are almost too bright to see past.
The sea answers — the sea knows no other option. Not as it wraps tendrils around the boy, forcing the last breaths from his aching lungs. This is as gentle as the ocean has ever let itself be.
But this is how it is.
