Gull, So Confusing: On Growing Up Beside The Sea
I was born within sight of the ocean. I didn’t have a particular affinity for water as a child, I quit swimming lessons early on and didn’t like the rain. Once I remember deciding that I would be one with the water. I stood back from the waves and commanded her to come towards me. She did not, and I never tried again. As I fell into adolescence and my body grew apart from my heart, I told the world that I hated the sea. At the beach I would not swim but sit, and hiss to every grain of sand how I could not stand its presence. It is not hard to imagine why as a child I was strangely discordant with the world around me, forcing a life for myself where I despised the very thing that surrounded me. Where I am from, the sea is a place of congregation - if you did not meet your friends at the beach, you did not meet your friends. I wonder now whether this feigned hatred of the ocean was a breakwater running adjacent to my bones, buffering the impact of relationships, making me an island, shutting down ports, and keeping me dry.
Last summer I took my father to Padstow and the weather reached 21 degrees. In the car with the windows rolled up, I saw the ocean sparkling like it was just uncorked. I had a sudden urge to run into the arms of the water I had insisted I did not love. Later that day I bought a cup with little blue fish all over it. I would like to say there was something profound about the fish, or that they looked like people I loved, but they were just little and blue on a tall white cup, yet they moved me irrevocably and changed the way I had told myself to see the world. I retracted every word of hate my younger self ever uttered and prayed it would keep me afloat, so the water would forgive me and not force me to drown. I continued having these epiphanies of amicability throughout the following year, where I would find myself loathing my surroundings unconsciously. The realisation was like turning off a whirring fan and discovering, now that it was quiet, why you had been so miserable while it droned in your ears. I resolved to remember how capable I was of loving and how unnatural hatred felt - although I thought this of many things, the sea came first.
My mother started swimming during lockdown. Whilst we all attempted to spring clean our lives, we were confronted with the darkest versions of ourselves which emerged once doors were locked and distractions scarce. She was one of the only people who I truly believe became a better person after this sombre period. She swam out to the same buoy at least once a week and every time she came back she seemed to glow, slick with salt, skin slightly chilly, like the sun had chosen her over all others. My mother begged us to join her, to feel what she did when the waves lifted her body until she became baby-light again. We refused every time, but there was always something about her pebbly smile that made me want to say yes. That summer I finally did.
I donned my swimming gear and put my clothes back over top so you would never know I was about to plunge into the chilled waters. I think being from Plymouth is a lot like that, something beneath the surface, discovered as colleagues wash away into friends, sitting within me wherever I go shaping me like a wave eroding rock even from afar. My mother used to comment how it was ironic that all the years I could have spent afloat, I chose the few months before I left to start loving the sea. It didn’t occur to me then, with my mind flooded with notions of moving away and becoming something new, how this may have been my body’s final plea to remain static, where the water was warm and I knew who I was.
I didn’t take my swimming costume to London. The thought of immersion in water which did not taste of salt and where I could not see the mast next to my first home felt like an empty imitation of that which I loved. I am unwilling to say that life in London was torturous, despite it often feeling this way. London is the most vibrant and all-consuming city I have ever existed in and I must continue to remind myself of the privilege I have to call myself a resident. However, as I sat in verdant parks and dined in underground spots, there was a cove within me, an echoing absence once filled by the ocean, glistening, imminent, and mine. As my time in the city went on, the absence grew less painful. It settled like sediment onto the floor of my skull as little aches in the shape of each person I had loved and left, but it never disappeared. Occasionally, I would kick at the sand and watch as my vision went foggy, grainy, and full of a gritty desire to return.
When I moved out of my first flat and into the second, my father marvelled at how quickly I threw my belongings on the floor, left the boxes unpacked, locked the door, and told him to step on it - there was a blustering need within me to breathe coastal air again. Stepping along the shingle aisle leading me to the bay, I suddenly feared something would go wrong. That I would have forgotten its lapping on my shins, get denied entry and spat out like a rock, branded an unwanted addition. Maybe it was the prick of pebbles underfoot or the water’s swelling magnetism, but I did not let myself turn back. I tried to slip as gently as possible past the silk surface, to make myself small and unnoticed lest I disturb the peace. Contrary to what I hoped, I was not inconspicuous. Yet contrary to what I feared, I was not rejected - I was swaddled. The not-quite-warm June water rippled against me and all at once I knew I was forgiven and had never been resented. The love of the ocean is unconditional and as steadfast as she is deep. There are etymological reasons that we call the sea ‘she’, but the romantic in me likes to believe her as a maternal presence; she is the largest mother on earth, kissing the forehead of the land. I didn’t quite swim that day, just drifted, as buoyant inside as out. I mused on what it felt like to be home, reading the words I would later write in the seaweed that clung to my arms.
I began writing this piece on that day and there was rarely a time during summer I was not in, beside, or thinking of the sea; maybe I needed to feel what it’s like to leave again after growing so fond of the place I was raised. Going back home for summer has instilled in me a twinkling pride about being from Plymouth. It has made me feel, as I stroll cobbled streets with the smell of salt and chip fat as myriad as the people that breathe it, what it is like to call somewhere home. To belong in a way that isn’t earned, to feel a bewildering polarity inside of you, because a need to escape meets a plea to always remain.
Whilst I painted my nails blue and fashioned a shell necklace, I discovered how I emulate my hometown in the way that I look and smell, the way I think and the way I flow against the people I love. My eyes are seafoam and my bones driftwood, I love in wave caresses, I crave the shush of the tide in the same way I need my parents. The closeness of my departure day loomed over me, so I found a space in the sun where the sea glimmered opalescent and the gulls were gutsy but least likely to steal a chip. I wondered - had I spent enough time watching the currents? Had I thought about it enough? Let it wet my eyelids? Would I be okay once it was no longer in my sight?
The answer of course is yes. I will once again adjust to glass and river as reflections and understand that no matter the surface, I remain the same girl looking back. And more so than anything, the sea will remain for as long as I am alive, beating on, mighty and gentle, all wine-dark and fleshy with a voice like velour, so stable and patient that I need not worry how long I spend with her, she will always remain if I ever need to sink for a while and remember what home feels like.
‘Gull, so confusing: on growing up beside the sea’ is featured in our Freshers 2024 Print Edition here: https://issuu.com/strandmagazine/docs/strandfreshersfinal
Sophie-May Ward-Marchbank performed this piece for Strand Magazine x King’s Poetry Society’s ‘Spooky Open Mic Night’ on Friday 25th October 2024.
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
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