Junk Drawer

On the train home from one night in Margate, our first without Luna since she was born. As we roll past fields and trees, from coast to city, it feels like the seaside wants to stay a secret.

I have a frozen margarita. We don’t have our kid, so we watch other people with their kids. A couple next to us are playing with their two (about four and seven), digging, chasing, snuggling, splashing. Some child free couple friends come to sit with them for a time, chatting before agreeing to see each other again in August. The parents become people in their own right, not just facilitators of these children.

We lie on the blanket we bought when we last came to Margate in September 2020, on our first weekend away after many months of lockdown. Another momentous excursion, for a different reason.

I can’t read, too distracted by trying to relax. The sun is warm and flies tickle the backs of my legs. My left thigh gets extremely sunburnt.

I go into the water, running to push through the confronting chill. It takes longer than I expect to get deep enough to submerge so I run for a comically long time, a cartoon character going nowhere.

Eventually, I’m in. It’s cold and I can see my goosebumps through the cloudy green water. Seaweed floats like salad leaves.

We eat fish caught from this water and drink cloudy, tangy wine.

At sunset, the tide is low, so we walk out to the spot where I was under water earlier and watch the bright orange egg yolk squish against the horizon until it’s gone. We’re tipsy and take many selfies.

This morning we set up on a quieter beach, next to what used to be a public lido and is now an overgrown concrete shell.

Low tide exposes mossy rock pools. No one else had landed here yet, apart from a group of older women a ways into the water, standing in a circle, doing some coordinated stretches. It is quiet and still.

I lie down. Still not able to read, but feeling at ease. I want to sink into this landscape forever, swallowed by the sand, dissolved by the waves, evaporated into a speck of sun.

But I know that I cannot and try to see the beauty in this brief encounter. An inhalation of all the elements that sustain me, until next time.

We have spoken few words to each other since we got to this spot and I am comforted by the silence. A knowing, loving, deferential silence. We are each having our own experience of this place, lying next to each other on this blanket that we bought five years ago, on a trip in which we did pretty much the same thing. Since then, the two of us grew another little body, who is not on this beach, but remains tethered to us wherever we are.

I sit up and the rock pools have disappeared, dark shadows under a shimmery surface. The women have reformed their circle further down the beach.