Ocean Tides

• Landrie Zuo, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2021

I still fold my napkins the way my mother taught me. Delicate cranes perch on the beige linen tablecloth with golden ribbons wrapped around their wings. I have always found them hideous; found it pathetic to manufacture beauty only for it to be unravelled. However, throughout my life, I have learned the value of tradition, of remembering, of memories.

I can still smell her mint breath, feel her coarse sun-dried skin, and hear her shrill voice bellowing an off-tune happy birthday to my brother’s unrestrained laughter and my obnoxious scorn. But I cannot see her face. Like a raindrop, it had fallen into an ocean of forgotten appearances, engulfed, and absorbed by them before it is indiscernible from the rest.

When my doctor had disingenuously massaged my shoulders with an MRI scan of my brain on his lap, I had anticipated the result, but it still reduced me to a forlorn despondency.

Now, my memories sit like aged sand on a beach. Each night, the tide creeps up onto it. It submerges it, grips onto it. As the tide sheepishly retreats, the water holds hostage of the loose layers of sand and exposes a new layer to be taken tomorrow. Sometimes the backwash returns the sand, rinsed and cleansed. I will recognise faces but not who is behind them: My washed memory does not tell me whether she is my cousin, or my neighbour, or a university classmate. I smile genuinely, but my greetings are glib as the sincerity remains in the ocean, floating debris in a body of homogenous blue.

Soon my daughter will fall into the ocean. Then my son. Then my grandchildren.

As I perfect the last crane, my feet drag my dejected body onto the plush consolation of my daughter’s childhood bed. Twisting onto my side, I find an open leather bag hanging from the vanity set I bought for her 12th birthday. Or was it her 13th? 14th? Emptying the bag, a flurry of polaroid photos cascade onto her bedsheet. I sigh. The shaky photos transport me back to her first day of school, her junior ball, her graduation day. Her tenderness makes me want to devour her: Seeds and all.
Amongst the photos is a Christmas card. My fingers nostalgically trace over my children’s faces with their mouths shaped in a ‘cheese position’ that had been held for too long. I stood then with my arms around them, however, my eyes fixate on an elderly woman behind me. Is she my mother? I squeeze my eyes to find that woman’s face in the ocean, but like hundreds of prior attempts, I cannot separate a raindrop from water. Dispirited and consumed by frustration, I slump down against the headboard.

However, when my daughter’s Jeep reverses across the street, when my son’s door knock vibrates through the timber walls, when my grandchildren’s unadulterated laughter floods the house, I am swell with the giddy excitement from my adolescence.

The tide will not take them tonight.