Written by Erica Cousins
The water’s edge is just as much my home as any house. I’ve spent every summer of my childhood, and now young adulthood, splayed out on the toasted sugar sands of my beloved seaside town. Warm rays of the sun are synonymous with the feeling of cool water wrapping itself around me, like a sleek cat rubbing its soft body against my ankles, buffeting its head against my leg. When I can’t be by the sea, those warm rays press themselves tight against my skin, goading that the soles of my feet are stuck fast on tarmac roads or encased in brick and glass. They penetrate an itch into the marrow of my bones, the core of my being. The claustrophobia of the sun has diffused into other aspects of my life. It’s now not only in the height of summer that I long for the refreshment of the sea, but in the depths of despair, confusion, or indecision.
On every worst day of my life, I stand barefoot on the shoreline and look out into the offing until I find resolution. This is my ritual, whether my feet are numb from the icy midwinter swash, or gusts of wind are whipping streams of sand against my calves. There’s peace in having something inconceivably vast on my doorstep, like living at the edge of the universe – the trivialities of life are nothing to the infinite and impenetrable. My troubles are quickly forgotten while watching vigorous currents squabble over the borderless surface of the sea, threatening to pull me out.
As a consequence of university, I spend most of the year living away from the sea now, following the tides of footfall up and down the conduit roads of London. Though rivers don’t offer the scale of an ocean, I know I can call on the Thames to drown my sorrows when mania creeps into the periphery of the mundane. My feet carry me past blank-faced buildings to the seam of the city, the crevasse into which avalanches of flagstones and office blocks tumble out of sight and drift away. I walk for hours up and down the Southbank, bearing footprints into the pavements, a big cat in captivity, hypnotised by the writhing, inky waters below. There’s something in the ebbing of the poisoned river that beckons, a flash in dark eyes or the glint of gunmetal. While the sea pulls my feet into the ground and drums out a steady beat against my ankles, the river draws the dull roar from my mind and curls it away into the mud and silt, to be dredged up for mudlarks to find.
Despite mapping my life against the flows and tides of water, I feel that my connection is not exclusive but universal. As I stand at the water’s edge, I feel the immanence of humanity in it. The ocean is a creator, bringing about conscious existence on earth and tethering it with an umbilical connection. Our bodies are palimpsests of genetic selection which chronicle our voyage onto land. Every mammalian feature paints a portrait of an ancient fish: our eyes are shaped as a product of being first used to see underwater, then repurposed to capture light through the atmosphere. A humanity, or any land species, that wasn’t born in water would be unrecognisable to us. Maybe not everyone needs the water at their feet like they need the water in their blood, sweat, and tears, but if the babbling brook is met with a listening ear, I think it holds a message for every one of us.
The sea runs through every river, settles in puddles at the side of the road, and streams out of taps and showerheads. When the rip currents of life draw me away from the shoreline and break waves of cement over my head, I know I can rely on my home to come back to me. Young and stupid, the ‘real world’ bears down on you tempestuously. I push my hand out past the boundaries of childhood, grasping at glassy fistfuls of promised wisdom, met with rushes of joy and freedom, but also with lessons rather left unlearned. In every case, I look for water. I look for reflection against its surface, for the route which turns me out at the doorsteps of my loved ones. I follow the fibres of time which stretch down the length of the river and out into the offing of the sea. I don’t know yet what I will find, but I know I will belong there.
