SALT
Elena
The sea reached me first through smell.
Not the view. That came later, all violent August blue and light scattered across the water. Not the waves either, although they had been folding themselves against the shore since before I sat down. It was the salt.
Salt, hot air, sun-warmed skin, and the faint dry smell of beach grass carried by the wind from beyond the last row of umbrellas.
My hand stopped halfway to the coffee. For a second, nothing happened. Then I was seventeen. Barefoot. Running.
“Wait!”
I didn’t.
The sand burned beneath my feet, but the harder it burned, the faster I ran. My sandals were somewhere behind me. So was the white cotton dress I had been told not to wear to the beach. I had abandoned both without regret. Someone shouted my name.
I laughed and ran straight into the water.
The first wave struck above my knees, warm at the surface and unexpectedly cold underneath. The second nearly took me down. I threw both arms out, recovered, and turned towards the shore.
“You’re insane!”
Perhaps.
I pushed the wet hair out of my eyes and walked backwards, farther into the sea.
“Come and get me.”
A hand caught my ankle. I screamed. Not elegantly.
For one glorious second I was certain something from the depths had found me. I kicked hard enough to injure whatever ancient monster had chosen the wrong teenager for lunch.
A boy surfaced beside me, choking with laughter.
“You absolute idiot!”
“You should’ve seen your face.”
“I hope you drown.”
“You’d save me.”
“I’d watch.”
He grinned; I splashed him, and he retaliated.
By the time we stopped, neither of us could breathe properly and the shore seemed considerably farther away. I floated onto my back.
Above me, the sky was enormous.
Someone called again from the beach. I ignored them.
Salt on my lips. Sun against my face. Water beneath my body.
For one impossible moment, nothing in the world could reach me. A wave broke too close. Coffee touched my fingers. I opened my eyes.
The cup had tilted slightly in my hand. A thin brown line had slipped over the rim and was travelling towards my knuckles.
My hand looked older around the white porcelain than the hand I had been inhabiting a second ago. Of course it did.
Thirty-eight years had happened to it. I set the cup down. The sea was still there. So was the heat.
Somewhere behind me, a girl laughed. I didn’t turn around.
I had learnt that some voices belonged to the present. And some only sounded as though they did. The coffee had gone lukewarm. I drank it anyway.
There were things one stopped demanding perfection from.
Coffee, apparently, was one of them.
I shifted in the chair. One of its metal legs sank a little deeper into the sand, leaving me tilted just enough to be irritating but not enough to justify moving.
Around me, the morning had acquired the lazy disorder of a beach that was no longer quite empty. Towels appeared in irregular territories. Bags were opened. Bottles rolled towards the slight incline of the shore. Children negotiated loudly with adults who had made the tactical error of believing they were in charge.
Somewhere behind the café, hot oil met something that had once been frozen.
Closer to the water, sunscreen, salt and diesel from a small motorboat occupied the same air without apparent conflict.
A man was attempting to anchor an umbrella. The umbrella disagreed.
I watched the struggle for a moment. The umbrella was winning.
I looked back at the water. That was better.
I had nowhere I needed to be. The thought arrived so quietly that I almost missed its strangeness. Nowhere.
No clock counting backwards in my head. No next thing waiting behind the present one. No pages still to revise, no dates to memorise, no material spread across the dining-room table with increasingly optimistic coloured markers. Nothing. It was over.
I let the words sit there. They produced surprisingly little.
There had been joy, certainly. The message. The number on the screen. Checking it again. The calls afterwards. Congratulations. Laughter. And beneath all of it—something else.
I had felt it first as an absence. No tragedy. No disappointment. Just air.
For several days I had moved through it almost weightlessly.
Then, once, alone in the kitchen, a hot knot had risen unexpectedly into my throat. I hadn’t cried. Not properly.
The body could be remarkably bureaucratic about such things. It filed emotion according to procedures of its own and rarely explained the appeals process.
Perhaps that was why the memory had found me this morning. Seventeen.
I hadn’t thought of that summer in years. Or perhaps I had. Memory was dishonest about its own frequency.
I reached for the cup again and stopped. No. That wasn’t quite right.
It hadn’t been the summer I remembered. It had been the feeling. I looked towards the water. Weightless.
The word came with such precision that I disliked it.
At seventeen, nothing had happened yet.
No profession chosen and abandoned. No roads taken seriously enough to become lives. No promises made with the full arrogance of believing one understood the future.
My knees had not yet developed opinions about unexpected stairs. I smiled. There were compensations.
At seventeen, the future had been obscene in its abundance. Now—I caught myself. Now what? I almost laughed.
There it was. The question that had travelled all the way to the sea with me despite not being invited.
I picked up the coffee and finished it. The answer could wait. I was on holiday.
I had earned the right to be intellectually useless until at least lunchtime. A shadow crossed the table.
“Another?”
I looked up. The young waiter pointed at my empty cup. He couldn’t have been much past thirty, although perhaps everyone under forty had begun to look implausibly young. I hesitated.
“Yes. Please.”
“The same?”
“The same.”
He collected the cup and disappeared between the tables. I watched him go. The same. Two perfectly innocent words.
I rubbed a grain of sand between my thumb and forefinger until its edges disappeared against the pad of my skin.
The second coffee arrived with a small glass of water and a biscuit I had no intention of eating. I ate it.
The sea had become brighter, almost metallic now. Farther out, a line of light cut across the surface so sharply that for a moment it looked like a road.
I followed it with my eyes. A road going where?
“Oh, don’t start.”
The words escaped aloud. Nobody appeared to notice. Good.
Talking to oneself was acceptable as long as there were enough people nearby doing stranger things. I took a sip. Hot this time. Better.
Behind me, someone dragged a chair across the wooden decking. A spoon struck the inside of a glass. A phone began playing music, stopped abruptly, then started again from the beginning. Three notes. I froze.
Not because I recognised the song. Because I didn’t. And yet something in those three notes had touched another place inside me—less clearly than the salt had, but with the same unsettling accuracy. I waited. Nothing came. The music stopped again. I exhaled. Ridiculous.
I had been doing this for days. Just noticing.
A dream whose images vanished the moment I opened my eyes but whose atmosphere stayed with me until breakfast.
A word overheard in a queue that seemed to arrive half a second before the stranger said it.
Once I had reached for my phone with the absurd certainty that someone was about to call. Someone had. None of it proved anything. I knew that.
Coincidences became impressive very quickly when one counted the hits and forgot the misses.
My former engineer’s mind could produce objections faster than most people could produce miracles. I took another sip. The wind changed. I smelled salt again.
This time no memory came with it. I was grateful. For approximately four seconds. Then I wondered why I was grateful. I put the cup down.
“Enough.”
A woman at the next table glanced over the top of her book. I smiled apologetically.
The woman smiled back and returned to the page.
I laughed then, quietly, at myself. The sea kept coming.
Wave after wave reached the shore, withdrew, and returned without ever finding exactly the same piece of sand. I lifted the coffee.
Somewhere far behind the noise of the beach, the girl was still laughing. This time, I listened.
