Beyond That, the Sea

by Laura Spence-Ash

she goes to the deck to look at the stars. She wraps herself in her blanket and lies down on a deck chair, far from the edge. It is cold and dark and yet perhaps it is one of the most beautiful things she has ever seen.

Before they all leave the beach, she turns from the Gregorys and faces east, back toward the island, and beyond that, the sea.

Together, they would always be fifteen and seventeen, on the cusp of something. How sweet that moment is, that moment of before. When anticipation is everything. When everything is new. When there are no consequences, when there is no after.

Some secrets are weights to be borne. Others are gifts, little bits of warmth, to be revisited again and again. No one else ever needed to know. No one else had the right to know. It was theirs and theirs alone.

Even now, the grief can paralyze her. Out of nowhere it comes, too, often on the cusp of something nice.

She wonders whether she’s being unrealistic, whether she’s searching for something that can’t be found, whether she’s trying so hard not to be her mother that she’ll end up alone. Her friends tell her she’s being too picky. She’s not even sure what she’s looking for. She only knows when it’s not quite right.

Chris looks up at the sky. What a beautiful day, he says. I can never decide. Is it better or worse when the world looks like this? Does it mitigate the loss when the world is so insistent on being beautiful?

To remember the boy he was, to try to understand the way that boy is connected to the man he is now.

When you look back, it’s so easy to see the path that you’ve traveled. But looking forward, there are only dreams and fears.

We love people for all sorts of different reasons and in all sorts of different ways, she says. Remember that. And it only gets better, the older you get. Young love isn’t necessarily the best love.

Dead or alive, we carry these people with us.