This is the first time that I've come here specifically to write, and it feels strange. There is about the place that not-busy but not-empty oddness where people are few enough for you to feel them staring, wondering. I plan to get used to that, to be here often enough for it to feel normal, to inure myself to the external as artists do who work in the field and have people stopping and peering over their shoulder. Maybe I'll even let them see my work in progress, my scrappy sketches, half-framed sentences.
Or maybe not.
The difference is that you cannot tell from the preliminary sketch of word-stuff how it will fall or twist or turn into something else again. The rough charcoal outline of shapes, capturing the child or the woman or the crashing wave, are more uncertain when rendered in words.
I sit and listen to the sea throwing me half-formed fragments, broken shells, ingredients for future spells, and I catch them as salt on my skin, and in my hair, and I will breath it in before I think to wash it away. Harvesting sea whispers.
There's a writing exercise I found somewhere, or maybe made up, that involves 'looking in the seven directions'. It felt like a place to re-start when I stalled.
To the NORTH there is the sea. Today the tide is at that precise boundary where the beach profile encourages the waves to break, but not so near that they're hidden below the wall, so I can sit and watch. I can watch waves breaking for long unmeasured time, and wonder what it is that entrances me. Today they are all white-laced frivolity over a sand-coloured floor, like a dancing bride in a cheap reception hall.
Eau-de-nil is an exotic colour, that should only apply to the shot silk of a cocktail dress, not to this end-of-season half-forgotten sea. But there it is.
Until further out, like everything eventually, it fades to grey. I want to call it blue, but not even the air force would stretch a point that far. Then further still, the undifferentiated horizon that doesn't invite imagined cliffs but rather suggests that all of the water simply pours over the edge into an unforgiving void.
Of course, I'm in poetic mood, so I'm filtering. I've edited out the foreground of the promenade and the rusty railings and the few people strolling and looking for a summer that has already dived into the surf and swum away. Flip-flops and hoodies. Yellow raincoats and blue wellies. Unnecessary sunglasses and hopeful buckets and spades. A giant white rubber ring with a unicorn head and a rainbow tail. Old ladies carry face masks like handbags.
EAST: the lifeboat station squats on the end of the pier, guarding the Pavilion Theatre, and I wonder if the traditional show has been thrown a lifeline. I like piers. I like the ironwork and rain-shelters. I like the absurdity of having a dock in water never deep enough for ships. I will go there next time and look more closely. It's always good to have a plan.
I don't look SOUTH. I know that behind me is the shack. It too deserves to have its own story told, but not today. Today I merely note its newly-white-painted walls and faded blue doors. I take pleasure in the unfeasible turquoise of the table & chairs. It is a basic space, but it is also a sanctuary in the making. A place becoming its new self, slowly becoming what I wanted when I first conceived the idea. The world intervened and in these first two years of my lease I've had precious little use of it and made equally little effort to create my vision for it. Until now. Today, I christen it as my writing shack – and start my journey into learning how to write in the curious glare of people who stop and stare.
To see anything to the WEST I would need to cheat and move. I have hunkered my camp chair in the sheltering corner of a pillar – any view that way is obscured by red Edwardian bricks and sea-scarred mortar. And cobwebs that I hadn't noticed are probably being extended into my hair.
UP above, as if UP could ever be below, except, I suppose, in outer space where Up and Down have no meaning. I believe that's also true inside a single atom. UP there is a duvet sky, unwashed and murky, like old feathers that have sweated through too many unpassionate nights.
And I think: me too.
Turning my gaze DOWN I look upon the cracked concrete and tarmac, where storm-washed traces of sand linger from the last high water or high wind, or maybe the grains have been carried up from the beach in sandals, shaken from towels and blankets, or perhaps they're burrowing upwards from below, the very ground making its own bid for freedom.
And so finally, I look INWARD. I find a sea mirror of emotions: calm and curiosity and a lack of confidence, breaking waves, and dissipating. It is a beginning feeling. A September start feeling, a back-to-school, new-girl, not good enough feeling that comes from having decided to sit out here and write. Not just this once, but repeatedly, for the foreseeable future. To come here, and bring whatever is going on inside and outside, bring it to the sea and bring it to the page and just see what happens. This is my self-medication, my self-prescribed cure for too many indoor yesterdays, too many years of stagnant shoulds. This is the next step towards my fresh-air future.
The tide provides the soundtrack and the gulls watch over me. Herring and Black-headed and Common, they flock now and then for a case conference, but mostly they send a lone Jonathan scout, westwards across my sky, sneaking a confirmation that I'm looking ok. Still breathing, still smiling, or at least not weeping. He'll tip his wings in acknowledgement, but assumes that I don't spot his sea-level return. When I'm feeling low, he will soar and dive through the air for me, catching thermals and onshore winds, playing to an audience of one. Or perhaps just playing. It makes me smile.
As I look North again, I see a ship, hazy, like a slow-moving island.
People pass, their ice-cream melting.
And I pause to listen to the sea.
And if it didn't smack too much of hubris, I'd say that I'm grateful to be me.
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