Slip Away

It’s been a long day walking out the hurt from bruising words. Distracted as you pick your way along the narrow coastal path, high up on the cliff edge, you round the corner to a bay so beautiful you catch your breath. Swathes of foliage part to reveal a tiny beach shimmering like an upturned shell that slides into a jade sea curving from cove corner to cove corner. The water is so clear that you can see, in perfect detail, the stones at the bottom of the bay and the air so still it’s unearthly. Overwhelming desire to wash your fatigued spirit clean sharpens your focus and quickens your pace.

Scrambling down the side of the steep cliff you balance on the foot-wide slash that leads through the sea of ferns, knees bent and leaning away from the precipitous drop. Be careful. The fine-bladed edges of the vertical slate cliffs will shred you. Slice your soul right out of you.

The sun is starting to dip as you pick your way across the beach kicking off your boots, the warmth from the slabs of rock seeping through the soles of your feet. Arcs of yellow and orange light bounce around the cove and you reach for motes of dust held in the beams. Where the water meets the shore there is no sound of water drawing back and forth but the sea is playing games. Your clothes, which you have slipped off and draped over the exposed rocks at the bottom of the cliffs, are wet before you can blink twice.

Tiny orbs of light dance across the surface of the water drawing you closer, the sea wants to fold itself around you and flush out your wounded soul. You edge in, wincing, the pebbles are more jagged than they look, but you push on and the water rises past your knees, your thighs and your waist, but the water sucks away your body heat in an exchange you can’t control. You gasp as the stop-your-heart cold thrusts through you.

You are aware of only the weight of your hands, your legs heavy too. There is a danger vibrating at a resonance you can’t decode, an interplay of silence and dissonance that is as old as the cove and the Irish Sea. It creeps all around you holding its breath just beneath the surface and hanging from the cliff faces, poised. You lift your hand, your fingertips searching for the seam you know must be there, one through which ghostly forms will slide.

Your thoughts are struggling to form, you cannot see even a hint of their outline and the harder you concentrate the harder they are to grasp. Your breathing quickens, but it’s like sucking air through wet cloth. The cliff faces lean in and over ready to take you whole. The sea pulls you closer. Everything wants your warmth, your spirit and heartbeat. As the last of the evening slips beneath the horizon the moon rests its clear gaze on your cold skin while the pulsing power of the night sets free a world with different faces and forms and sounds. It is quieter, more intent. Dispassionate. You imagine slipping into the water, no more arguments or harsh words, it would be painless to succumb. To drift away and no longer be.

But a flash of memory is like a pilot light, reigniting your fight while colours and sounds and laughter flood your thoughts. An involuntary shiver is followed by another and another, jolts that turn your focus to the push-pull of your diaphragm, each deliberate lungful feeding the fire. You turn your face away from the moon and the promise of tranquillity to the shoreline, which lies solid in your eyeline. Your sinews flex, an instinctive conversation between nerves, muscles and tendons which propels one leg at a time through the water. Now you move your arms too and the splashing cuts into the silence, repelling that other world yet further.

The water slides down from your waist to your thighs and your knees, until finally you are only ankle-deep, rivulets of cold the last touch of the sea. Standing on the old stones absorbing the vestiges of warmth your fingers and toes tingle as blood carries life back through you. You begin bouncing up and down, windmilling your arms, your vigour building force. Opening your chest wide you tilt your head upwards and an old sound slips from your throat, an ancestral strength that reverberates round the cove, pushing the cliffs back and away and revealing the ancient expanse of clear night sky. You haul yourself up through the ferns, away from the bay, head clear and triumphant.