I kicked my shoes off and let my toes sink in the sand. I walked across the shore with nothing but the ocean in my view. Its lilting sway pulled me closer, closer, like an unseen hand, a force of truth, past and present knocking at my door.
There was something childlike about the ocean’s song, alluring like a melody I could’ve sworn I’d heard before. It felt like a waking dream but also like alarm bells blaring, pulling me from lands of slumber.
I hadn’t known I was asleep at all.
The ocean’s tune is at once so distant and so present that—without our permission—it can suddenly call us home. It picks us up and throws us down, leaving us changed, somehow different than before.
Perhaps a stone feels the same about its majestic bath as it’s lifted and tossed, swirled in oceanic rage and glory. Repeatedly it’s washed until it is dropped on unfamiliar land, carved into something new. There, facedown in the sand, its past and future meet.
Memory works in overtime if you let it, especially by the sea. Two summers ago, I spent a day walking Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina, and though my family never spent time there—it was Hunting Island, Hilton Head, or Myrtle Beach for them—it links to the same water where my grandad and his brother-in-law lured oysters from the deep, where my uncle caught a baby shark and showed me its fins, its tiny rows of teeth.
I moved away from the South twice, never intending to return. Baltimore, Cleveland, and New York were home for a while. But as as the stone is tossed by waves, I find myself here again—not on the coast but up towards the mountains.
What’s behind me hovers over the present with questions, or maybe answers, I didn’t want to face. When people fade from your life like sand castles at sundown, you’re left with no choice but to search for your own path forward, a way of being that’s yours alone.
Yet water carries us right back where we started. When the ocean throws a stone down in the sand, it must be shocked into the very presence of its being.
I felt like the stone two summers ago on Sullivan’s. There I was, transported, eight years old on a similar shore. From the edge of Charleston I was pulled inside a moment I had lived before. As the sun shimmered on deep water, the salt seeped into my heart and shadows, both, shifting time as we know it. Suddenly I felt what it was like to carry a child’s hope for my family—the weight of that.
Old hope, former friend, washed over me by the water—a reminder that some pieces of ourselves never leave. They may seem departed, but they are merely tossed about, baptized by waves till they appear again. At eight, staring into the horizon where blue meets its deeper shades, I still believed my family could find its way.
On Sullivan’s Island I remembered what it’s like to be young, living in the moment as life unfolds for the first time. You haven’t started looking back. Revisiting a former self reminded me of needs left unmet and dreams unfulfilled. Unchecked rage and family ties, broken harshly.
Even at eight I had priorities. I sought harmony and simplicity, freedom from chaos and less strife. The ocean offered a taste of that freedom and dampened my worries, widening my perspective till I felt safe and small.
If you’ve ever been struck by a wave more forceful than expected, if your center of gravity has been disturbed by moving water, if your mouth has filled with salt, then you’ll understand what it’s like to suddenly feel the lightness and weight of being eight again.
Returning to a place that shaped me cracked open a door, inviting me to peer at a fragment of myself I thought I’d left behind. Two summers ago, it seemed all family hope was lost, but a younger version of myself had other ideas.
Knocked off-center, re-adjusting my footing, I returned to the present, where I’ve grown taller, maybe even wiser. There I acknowledged the grief of hope, shriveled and changed. Like the stone after its bath, I am different now.
Seashells whisper the ocean’s song, revealing secret shapes and colors. Like former selves we wish to shed, hope doesn’t ever go away. It might get beaten by waves, nearly forgotten, but it can reappear. Like unpredictable lightning, new lines blitz across the sky.
Shadows have shifted and tides have turned, but there in the salty current, my younger self offered a glimmer of her resounding trust, her belief that nothing is ever lost, that love can always gain. I reached out with a prayer of thanks.
As her fingers and mine met over the water, I looked into those familiar brown eyes, speckled with gold. I saw truth, backed by faith. Entire reservoirs of hope. At last, I recognized them as my own.
Between you and me—
I wrote this piece in January 2020, prematurely emailed it to Abby, and put it away. I am heading to the ocean this week—John’s sweet response to my talking about water all spring and summer—which made me pull it out again. It needed editing, but here it is, a tiny glimpse into the ever-evolving process of healing and acceptance we all experience in some form.
What struck me immediately when reading this is that the person who wrote this essay had no idea what was coming. She did not know our lives would be changed by a pandemic, or that life plans she’d been fighting for would pause for two years. How would she have reacted to that news? Not positively, I am sure.
One intriguing part of making things is the snapshot of our lives they offer when looking back. Oh, there she is—I remember her—that version of myself, configured by a particular point on the space-time continuum—she was trying so hard. I see her now with the same love and compassion I have for the child standing on the beach.
As you know, I intentionally made this newsletter something other than a links-and-current-events weekly, because 1) there are enough of those, and 2) the point of WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE has always been for me to write and help myself and others orient around the pressing questions of our time.
Last week’s update was fun, though, so I will follow up by saying that, hello, can you believe Britney voiced her gratitude for #FreeBritney online this week? I have questions. Did she gain access to her accounts in the July 14th hearing? Did she get control after so many team members quit? Did she always have a level of input that was heavily edited? We may never know. Her boyfriend’s support on Instagram has been sweet. The world has ignited behind #FreeBritney, though I can’t help but feel millennials own a piece of the fight. We are products of the same problematic culture that created Britney’s struggle in the first place. Free Britney, and free us all.
Until next time, my people, take care.
WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is written by Lauren Maxwell. If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider supporting it by becoming a sponsor. You can also click the heart, share online, forward to a friend, or buy Lauren a coffee. It all helps!
These beach thoughts are taking me BACK…