Saltwater

by Jessica Andrews

This love is heavy; salty and viscous, stinking of seaweed and yeast.

My auntie trained to be a beauty therapist and went to work in a salon in Yorkshire. From Monday to Friday she waxed eyebrows and plucked ingrown hairs from the creases between ladies’ thighs in an attempt to make them feel like they were in control of something.

There was an unpredictability about him that appealed to her. She couldn’t bear the feeling of all of the years of her life stretching out before her in a series of jobs and cars and weddings and grey Tuesday afternoons with freshly Hoovered carpets. He was inconsiderate and unreliable but he was a nicotine sort of electric that kept her on her toes. He

As an adult, it feels liberating to name things; to push them out of my body like long, sharp splinters and mould them into words. Naming things gives them shape and form, which means they can be picked up and taken away.

My mother posts me the Laura Ashley curtains with a handwritten note. ‘Found these in the back of the wardrobe. Thought they’d be nice in the cottage.’ I hang them up at my bedroom window. As a child I spent hours lying upside down on my mother’s bed, coaxing ladies with long hair from the wisteria pattern.

I spend days wondering what exactly I am doing in Donegal. I am so drawn to difficult things. I am always travelling far away from the people I love. I am constantly searching for something that I cannot articulate, uprooting and disappearing based on an abstract feeling in the pit of my belly. What if it was not the right thing to leave London? What if this is not the right way to live? Perhaps it is better to want tangible things, like bodies and objects. Everything I want is invisible. Do invisible things have worth?

I find it difficult to sleep in the cottage. I think it is because I don’t have many people to talk to, so my thoughts get trapped under my skin like blisters.

think that if love was a colour then it would be brown. It is the colour of rust and rot and decay, of avocados spoiled by the passing of time and of dirt and age and things that have been forgotten. It is the colour of tobacco and coffee, of soil and chocolate and whiskey; things that are delicious in a heavy, cloying way.

They went from doctor to consultant to audiologist and back again. His world was made up of corridors painted in creams and teals, machinery that he couldn’t hear clicking and whirring behind closed doors. We learned to think differently; outside of the language of our thoughts and the language of the family we thought we had. We had to think outside of language altogether.

through the words that people use most regularly. I want to drop my new words into conversation, in the post office and at the grocery shop down the road, but they are chewy in my mouth like peanut butter.

I want to be small like her but you tell me tall is beautiful. She is Mary in the school play and I am the narrator. I have words to say and she does not. You tell me that is better but I’m not sure.

I sit at the table one night, drinking wine and looking out of the window, at the bald patch in the garden where we had the bonfire, and the bath full of old saucepans and cracked china that we couldn’t burn and so don’t know how to get rid of. I think about our relationship, and the way that the city eroded our love. I send him an email, even though I know I shouldn’t. I write, ‘Autumn always makes me think of you, in your long, brown coat.’ In the morning I read his reply. ‘Sometimes it is nice to hold onto things, instead of letting them go. Isn’t it?’

Midge bites and jellyfish stings. Angry kisses reminding me that I am a body. Blisters and jelly shoes, bruises in the afternoons.

I sat in the grass for a while and looked out at the sea and the curvature of the earth shimmering in the distance. It seems inconceivable that there is no land between Ireland and America. It seems inconceivable that I ever cycled around Elephant and Castle roundabout at rush hour, or subsisted for weeks at a time on instant coffee and cereal. Sometimes, in order to move forward, you have to go to the edges. 7 There was a music festival in the summertime and an old lorry was parked in the fishing port with the sides taken off.

‘What you reading?’ I put my arm over the cover, feeling exposed. ‘It’s nothing.’ ‘Read a lot of books, do you?’ ‘I suppose so. Do you?’ ‘Fuck no. Can barely even write me own name.’ There is a small silence. Our difference hangs delicious in the air between us. ‘Want a drink?’ ‘Yeah, go on then. Thanks.’

is still a revelation to me that I can sit with a person with all of the ordinary boundaries between us, and then with a few carefully chosen words we might end up somewhere else together, all fingers in mouths and hard, wet nipples.

I listen to my body and I let her do what she wants. Here is a space for her to grow, up into all that sky.

The crab claws arrive arranged in a flower and seasoned with garlic. He holds one up to my face. ‘Have one,’ he tells me. ‘Go on.’ I look at the crab claw and I look at the delicate hairs on his arms. I think about my dinners in London; sad bowls of lentils and chickpeas seasoned with vegetable stock. I want to learn abundance; how to have things without fear.

In my life in Donegal, I am learning how to take what I want. There are unfulfilled desires, curdled inside of me. I have buried things; swallowed them down and turned off the light. I must learn how to listen to my body again. I must learn how to need, how to ask, how to want.

There is something between us that was not there before. Loose secrets in the dark and the snag of you pulling away from me. His hands threaded through yours in a shade of red that is strange. Your body, puckered and sore. His lips, chapped and hungry. Things you do not want me to know. You are turning away from me, tucking us into places I do not want to go.

I am becoming a person who does her own things. Things that no one else knows. Roller-skating down hills on one foot like a pink flamingo, daring my bones to shatter. Hiding in other people’s gardens, peeking in at the yellow fuzz of their teatimes through half-closed curtains. Scribbled stick-men on skirting boards and earrings stolen and tucked under pillows. I do things alone now, without you. I want to be close and I want to be distant. I push my fingers so far into the soil in the garden that the fleshy webs between them ache. I am seeing how far I can go.

So many bodies. Bulges and lumps in places I didn’t even know about. My body is prickly and we are finding new ways to define ourselves.

He says he gives away too much of himself to others but I think that perhaps I do not give enough. I do not have a surplus of self. I cannot afford to give parts away.

There was a wildness in her that scared me. I envied it. I breathed in her skin as she reached over me to grab her bottle of Diet Coke, flat and sour from too long in the car.

The answer is space. There is so much space here that there is no need to reduce old things to rubble.

It is similar to looking at your own Facebook profile, which seems narcissistic but is actually just a way of trying to find a sense of yourself and comparing the way you feel to the way that others see you.

Reading made me feel like I was standing on the precipice of something very tall, and I suspected that one day I would jump off the edge of it.

It seemed unfair to me that he had so much proof of his existence, while I was getting smaller every day.

Some days I am very raw, as though my outer layers have been peeled away, exposing the new parts of myself to the wind and the sea spray. When you have been distant from yourself for some time, coming back into your body is alarming. Acknowledging that your desires are plural and even contradictory is a difficult realisation, but it is necessary if you are going to live in a way that is true to yourself.

I have a nice one. He kisses and sucks and licks and fucks but there is a mad, sad thing growing in my belly. I always want more. I do not want to be me for reasons I do not understand. I have read too much

He went to a school for the deaf but he didn’t identify with the other kids there. He wanted to be hearing, but he wasn’t. He didn’t want to be deaf but he was and so he cut himself off from a world that could have offered him answers.

I call Alex to update him on my recent discoveries. ‘I’m so stuck in my head all of the time,’ I tell him. ‘But he is completely in his body. I want to be like that.’ ‘Maybe he can sense that, too,’ Alex says. ‘You need to find a language that both of you can speak.’ Alex is a painter writing an MA thesis on the way that different artistic mediums convey different sentiments, like alternate languages. We have spoken about it at length together, but I haven’t thought to apply it to people.

Girls like me are not supposed to want things. Everything is difficult for him and I have it all. I am pretty and clever. I do not have holes in my head or in my heart. How dare I want any more?

High-rise tower blocks and the despondency of stale, squat houses are aesthetically pleasing when you are removed from them. Middle-class architects with utopian ideals might be able to appreciate the solidity and the magnitude of a huge hunk of concrete with lives carved unapologetically into it, but when that becomes your reality and you have no choice and no way out, when you’re living every day under the shadow of someone else’s vision, it becomes oppressive, the weight of their dreams crushing the life out of you. A

think too much about things. I have too much to say. My body takes me places that my mind does not want to go. My edges are beginning to fray.

I look at the cliffs and sea and sky. ‘Don’t you ever feel guilty?’ I ask him. ‘I mean, it’s beautiful here. Don’t you ever feel bad for wanting something more?’ He skips a step. ‘It isn’t something more,’ he says, decidedly. ‘Just something else.’

This morning when I put on my socks, I remembered the way my grandfather used to put them on for me when I was a child. He always turned them inside out then matched the toes to mine and rolled them up onto my feet. Maybe you have to turn something inside out before you can begin to stand the right way up.

had to go into the toilets and rest my head on the cool cubicle door until I stopped shaking. I couldn’t get rid of the image of us running away up the street, my drunkenness making me oblivious to the sharp stones in the gutters as I rushed towards the next bright thing, leaving her behind.

The man drives his car drunk and I let him. I trust this person, with his shaky hands and fruity aftershave, with my life. I scrunch it into a small ball and shut it in his glove compartment, where it gets warm from the heat of the engine.

knew the streets of Camden were lined with poets and rock stars waiting for me to step into their lives and fasten their trench coats over my underwear on Sunday mornings as I popped out for eggs and milk. I wanted a place that was more chaotic than me.

feel lonely and turn on the radio but the jangle of the news studio in London and all of the things that are happening in the world make me dizzy. Even though I am alone, quite far away from other people, and my days are filled with walks and books and cooking meals, I have not been able to hear the silence. My mind is roiling with anxieties, thoughts crammed thickly inside of my skull. When I close my eyes at night I hear police sirens calling to me, puncturing my sleep.

Since I came to live here and gave myself room to think and to breathe, a liquid calm has begun to pool inside of me. I am coming back into myself. When

want a life that is full, which means dirty and delicious. Order seems to mean emptiness, or at least it does for me.

I am wrong again and I will never be right. I am burning in a cold way, like ice when it sticks to the skin. The other girls seem smoother, thin wrists cool and marbled, whereas I am sticky and hungry and soiled. I want to be harder and cleaner and better. I don’t want to be made from blood and breakable bones, like you.

talked offhand about old girlfriends and countries he had lived in. I loved the word ‘ex’. I was desperate to have a past of my own.

And then, just as I was really beginning to enjoy my lectures and have faith in my ideas, I graduated.

I left your world to straddle another and the thing about balancing is that sometimes you fall. The boundaries between most things are very thin.

thought about all of the tiny parts of myself that were lost. Strands of my hair caught in plugholes and chunks of my knees smushed into gravel outside nightclubs. I remembered how new and shiny I was at the beginning and I wondered what I looked like now. I squeezed my mam’s hand as the sun leaked through the window, melting our make-up. When

There is a boiling. A burning. Acid-sharp. I know that I am bold enough now to be on my own but I no longer know if that is what I want. Not now. It seems not-right. I don’t want to be here with him who is missing, who has always been missing, who does not know how to hold. Who never held me. A dark shape with strange edges that I do not have a place to keep. And yet I must. Bury it. Seal it up. Trap it inside. 58 They were all due to get the same train back up north. I travelled to King’s Cross to wave them off. We hung around outside Pret checking the clock, half-expecting my dad to turn up. ‘I’m really not surprised,’ said my mother, when he didn’t appear. ‘He’s so selfish sometimes.’ My chest grew tight. The orange lights on the boards burned above our heads, listing all the cities soon to be stacked between us. ‘Let me know when he gets in touch,’ my mam said. ‘He will be okay, Lucy. He always turns up, eventually.’ The air around us began to shimmer. I felt an overwhelming

Somewhere in the future, maybe my daughter is asleep in this bed. I can hardly bear to imagine how much she will have inside of her.