The little girl ran into the water as it crashed over her tiny body. She rode her boogie board up and down over the waves and though this was exactly what she wanted it lacked something. Her mother or father would not have been enough to make it complete; she wanted something more, more than a friend, someone to ride waves with her, something she could not define, but knew existed.
Ever since the baby had died within her mother’s stomach this feeling had become more pronounced. And no one at school liked her, she had no friends or at least no friends close enough to bring to the beach, despite her family’s nice beach house. She had no one to keep her company and yet it was not a pure loneliness that struck her. It was a feeling that permeated her being as she waited until her mother was ready to take her to the shore by mid-morning, when she assembled lunches and umbrellas and beach chair, and walked with her holding her boogie board down the boardwalk to a place in the sand that seemed good for the day. But it was not good. Something was wrong. Something was missing, had been missing, and now as the girl watched the jellyfish float along with her and paddled away so as not to get stung, she felt it sharpen inside her, this emptiness like a deep knowledge that once seen was impossible to forget, and which no one would could fill. She knew that even if she did have a friend with her, the emptiness would remain. It was more than a simple loneliness; it was a loneliness of being, marked by ritual and habit, and an understanding of exactly when she would tire and how her mother would want to go back to the house and she would shower away the sand in the outside shower attached to the deck, and pick out the tiny grains of sand in her hair and her ears that stuck there from being tumbled by the waves, and the sun would set and they would have dinner and she would get ready for bed and do it all again tomorrow.
She didn’t hate it either; that was part of the problem; she was having fun riding the waves, even if there were too many jellyfish. But she couldn’t say she was unhappy. Even the sandwich her mother made her was tasty and she had that to look forward to; no: it was something she didn’t know how to articulate, something she could only feel by forgetting about herself, which she did when she closed her eyes and floated with her face in the water so that the waves crashed over her and it was very quiet, except for the bubbles that came from the waves.
When she did that, she felt peaceful, but it was too short-lived because she needed to take her head out of the water to breathe, so that she stayed conscious. She thought of keeping her head in the water until she couldn’t breathe any more, but she didn’t want to die, and at the last second her consciousness always took her into herself and she raised her head and gasped for air. But before that, when she felt the waves just wash over her and make a sound of blowing bubbles, she was happy. She wondered how she could make that feeling last forever, or if she could make it last outside of the sea, at all. She hoped that she could, but she didn’t know how, so she hoped that one day she might be able to. And she walked to the shore, to her mother, because she was tired and hungry and needed to rest.
As she walked to the shore, boogie board trailing behind her, she remembered opening her eyes underwater and seeing the trails of dark sand below. She wondered if that was what her dead brother saw, a kind of peaceful stirring, quiescent, submerged. She wondered if it was enough to feel like that when she was alone in the ocean, staring at the bottom of the sea, with her eyes open or closed, and if it made up for the loneliness or emptiness, or whatever the sharp nagging in her belly was.
She decided that it did, and to forget about it and just have fun, while she waited for whatever it was inside her to fill.
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