Watered-down memory

You exit the car, close it’s door and look around. The sun is scorching hot, despite being in front of the shore you can barely feel any wind; behind you, your children exit the car, giggling with beach toys in their hands, almost yelling about everything they want to do.

As they approach fast and steady for the shore, you and your partner walk behind with a parasol, some beach towels and clothes for the kids. They reassure you that everything is going to be okay, you doubt, not because you don’t trust your partner’s words, but because you distrust water.

As they mount the parasol, you call the kids to apply some sunscreen. As both of you cover them in the white cream, your partner talks about endless summers in their childhood, when they used to come with family and friends, they say with a smile that practically everyone in town flooded the place in summer.

You listen intently, you’ve only come a few times before. You don’t know how to swim so your guess is that it probably wouldn’t have been all that fun to you.

As your children go for the shore again, you remember. When you were really young, your mother used to bring you here in the morning in early spring, you actually lived relatively close and your mother enjoyed reading on the sand as you played with the still cold water under a more tolerable heat; you remember this as enjoyable journeys, mostly, until one day, when you were seven.

That was the last time you came, you weren’t far from the shore as you didn’t know how swim and your mother was always watching you and asking you to come closer, when she wasn’t looking you got yourself up in a line of rocks and walked along them, going deeper into the sea, your mother called for you and as you turned around you fell into the water.

You almost drowned that day.

All you remember after falling into the cold and dark waters was opening your eyes in your mother’s arms in the shore, she was crying, the sun coming down, book long forgotten, the day disappearing in a heartbeat.

Sometimes when you think about it you feel like you never came out of the water.

The feeling of cold water still makes you feel uneasy and you can’t even put your head below water without feeling asphyxiated. The memory of that day still sends shivers down your spine.

You are suddenly pulled back into reality by your partner’s hand holding yours, they don’t know every detail, but they know you are not very fond of water and they surely noticed how you were spacing out.

You smile and watch the shore again, with your children running and splashing water into each other, unaware of the fears you’ve been trying to bottle up.

You try to remember other instances, other memories in the beach but all you remember is the cold water and your mother reading under a parasol, she didn’t know how to swim either as far as you know, she would always shout your name to keep you in shallow waters, always reminding you that it was easier than you thought to get deeper.

You remember the soft rays of the morning sun on your skin, the salty smell that remained in your clothing and hair, the sand that always found a way to follow you home and then, with no warning, you remembered.

You remembered some days you would go back to your mother, stating that something cold had graced your legs, something as cold as ice. Your mother would brush it off and say it was probably nothing, just something in the water, dancing with the waves, be it a small fish, a plastic bag, inoffensive things that sometimes wandered in the tides and made their way into the shore, hard to see below the water.

Yet in that moment you realise that ice cold thing that had graced against your skin as a child gave you the same sensation you felt in your whole body the day you fell, it was something that caught you and dragged you down until you lost consciousness.

Your partner looks at you with a concerned look, knowing you are sliding into panic, you watch terrorized to the shore as you see your kids going further and further, into the depths.

You can’t put any of your thoughts in order, without pronouncing a single word you run towards them.

You know that thing is still in the water.