Solemnity

Tide - 325 words
Sarah Van Name

Ever since I was a kid (read: solemn, serious, blonde, good at poker) I have planned my beach trips for high tide, right down to the very minute when the ocean stretched its salty seaweed tentacles the farthest up the beach. Finding shells is cool, floating in the sea can be nice, but I don’t understand who would want pansy low tide when you can have the whip and push and hard spray of high. The ocean is not calm, it is frenzied and furious, it is pushing your body into a small ball of limbs as you’re shoved into the sand, turned over and over with the cold fishy taste of it in your nose, it loses your goggles, tangles your hair, I’m not saying it’s pleasant but it’s necessary. The ocean is vast and omnipotent, the stuff of nightmares.

I think there is a psychology of ideas on oceans, and what that says about you and your tangled-hair goggle-lost insides. It’s like digging your crescent moon nails into your skin or punching a guy in the face or kissing someone really hard after not seeing him for a long time. Loving high tide is an expression of passion, mostly anger.

When the foam lashed against the dunes, I walked along them as a solemn blonde child and didn’t fall in because I was afraid of getting my dress wet. It was evening then and the sky was too dark for me to try my strength. But the next day, while my mother made a sand castle and my brother’s skin slowly burned, I jumped so my body would catch the crest of the wave just as it crashed. I felt the full sting and the water broke in full and filled itself in around me. And my solemnity fluttered to the sandy bottom with the cracked shells and bits of seaweed, and it clings to me, but I try to cast it aside.

Swim Until You Can't See Land - Frightened Rabbit