Answers? No, thanks.
I just want to keep on asking questions. Hoping for the
mysteries to be more than ever before. 42 is not the answer to anything, and it’s
not the end. Unless you’re Elvis Presley, and then, barring some mistaken
identity in Walmart or a waffle burn shape, you are gone.
There’s this beach I like to go to which has moods. You
wouldn’t guess that straight off the bat, but visit it enough and you’ll see:
When the tide is coming in, the rock pools are a foamy flurry, but when the tide
is low, the little ecosystems are tiny arrangements of shells, fish,
living creatures and seaweed slow dancing to the breeze.
The sand on that beach can be a range of textures: Soft
enough to dig a little castle out of, and coarse enough to turn up brilliant
mother-of-pearl shards and unholy digging beasts.
Sometimes, after a spring tide or storm, reeking swathes of
kelp litter the strand and provide perches for seagulls. The hunch-shouldered
brutes bully each other away from scraps of dead things and shriek above the
rolling belch of the waves.
The beach is always the same, but the sun, sky and sea act
as sculptors in a contest using the same material, snatching the clay from each
other and tinting it backwards and forwards. A plastic bottle wedged between
rocks turns out not to carry a romantic missive from another continent, but
just one from nature: “10 000 years before I disintegrate”, it whispers, “10 000
years, 10 000 years.”
Trains pass intermittently on a track just metres from the
shore, and there will always be one small child lifting a hand to wave as you
stand on the rocks. You can wave back, but it’s probably the same child
travelling up and down, simply to offer acknowledgment to those who are trying
to embrace their isolation as they stare out to an ocean which never pours off
the edges of the world.
The smell of coconut hangs in the air from the lotion rubbed
on the flesh of the visitors and washed off by the shower which dribbles fresh
water into the saline pools. If you stare long enough into the blue-green-white-black
void of the surf, you may see a dolphin or a seal, but your eyes will start to
hurt so you’ll look away, willing that rock to move again.
Footprints form temporary craters that get filled and
emptied every day, brittle, brief reminders that people walked where once a sea
creature shoved itself out onto the sand with fins and slid off into the hills
wondering why it couldn’t find fish to eat.
My children would report, having visited there: We went to
the beach, the one with the pool. We looked at the rocks and picked up shells.
We dug holes and had fun.
A poet took her wax paper-wrapped ham sandwiches with her in
a scarred leather satchel and pushed into the breakers, sank like a badly
reviewed volume of verse.
Bring on 43.
