Undulating Currents

• Emma Draghiciu, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2019

When I was younger, I often would find during my journeys along the beaches the things the waves had coughed up on sandy yellow coastline. I remember pearlescent little shells, no bigger than a fingernail, brittle sea urchins and chalky bits of cuttlefish bone. I recall once, I clambered on top of the rocks and found, nestled between dry algae, a big fish, with scales like the most delicate of armor plating. It was speckled still with fluro yellow bands and black lines. Death weighed in its dry skin, baking in the hot sun, like wallpaper strips but scattered with barnacles.
I did indulge in curiously poking lightly at things with driftwood stick, still with a quiet sort of nervousness or apprehension. Even the tender greens and tranquil blues could brim with danger. The soft sepia tones of rocks were jagged and cut. The sleepy tides were merely dormant.

And as I traversed on, I learnt that below the surface no matter how still, were unstoppable currents moving unimaginable volumes of water. Beneath the dark blue waves—I felt it, a tugging. At one point I stopped running towards the water. I still trusted the waves, letting them cradle me in formless arms—but at my own accord. I did not have gills, and sometimes the water did scare me. I continued forward on glistening cotton-white sand, tiptoeing around jellyfish remnants, finding trinkets here and there.
I understood life and death and the dry fish bones washed up on the shore. Despite that, I used to wonder whether, if I had been born in the oceans with fins for limbs, like that fish that was alive perhaps only a few hours ago, would I have noticed the water I floated in? Would I long seeing the beaches where the waves rolled, electric blue and white fringed? Or perhaps I’d long to see the stormy sea, where you couldn't tell where the grey skies ended and the grey ocean began. Even the mill-pond-still harbors, glinting like ivory mirrors would not be forgotten too soon.
I focused my attention to the setting sun on the horizon, its golden hues still seared in my memory, before racing back across the expanse of sand, mingling with salty air that bit at my skin. Whenever I did return, and found myself back in my room or listening to the lazy hum of some familiar sound that echoed through the house, I supposed that if I had been born with the water being my air, I knew I would still miss my home and all that I do have.

Some of the shells I collected from my journeys I was allowed to keep. I stored them in mason jars, kept them close on bedside tables or pristine new shelves for a long time. Guarded them like treasures. The jars are now put away in the back of the garden shed and in the intertwined fibers of my mind. And from time to time, in my dreams or on a soft day in late summer I would walk along the beach, swim against the currents to travel again with the undulating waves as if I was a fish deep underneath in the depths of sea.