Apparition premonition

I wake up early. The morning gathers up tendrils of night, slowly breathing light over the coast. I begin to run with eyes barely open, waves playing with my feet. As each wave recedes the sand grows soft and I pump my legs harder to keep the pace.



By the time I cover four beach-lengths I am running with sweat and sea, salty fingers pulling at my body. I dive in. Feel a stingray touch my leg.

The sea is calm and grey and I am completely alone.

The quiet cliffs remind me of Cornwall. I sit. My seventeen-year old self comes silently up behind me and squats in the sand, looking out at the blurred horizon.

I study this child. Right now I look more like her than I have in ten years. Her skin is transparent and I see the sand in drifts through her chest. She echoes through time and space, longing written all over her face.

I remember being her in this moment. I know what she is thinking. Something just happened to her that came as a shock, and she is deep in it, deep in the swirl of those big life questions.

This is the first moment she ever accepted the importance of not feeling insignificant.

She thinks that she will die before she is thirty. She is convinced, in fact, and she doesn't know why.

The sea looks the same to me as it does to her, even though mine belongs to southern Nicaragua instead of southern England. Twenty-seven years creep onto my face, hang from my limbs. As I look at this girl, so small and yet so endless, I am split by a deep understanding and at the same time a total incomprehension.

I don't quite know how to interpret her thoughts, so I walk away.

I pad through the sand to the water's edge, heels imprinting in the sand. Dive in once again. The water is cool and flows over my face. I duck again and again, feeling the heat being carried away from my burning skin.

The softness of everything wraps me gently. I watch the shore, as my younger self slowly fades away. Once again, I am alone.