On The Winter Beach Town

On the second day of winter

I wake up and draw my blinds to violent wind reshaping the tree line. I would like to take this body out walking along an unperturbed stretch of sand. Rows of power lines in the distance swing like skipping ropes. I remember waiting for the bell to ring in primary school, never exactly knowing when to jump in. The new and oppressive weatherboard sharing our fence line obstructs any way of ascertaining if the bay is flat this morning. The Bureau of Meteorology tells me that the north-westerly wind lifting anything not significant enough to stay on the ground is doing so at forty-four kilometers an hour. I have never known where north, east, south, west goes: this body is always moving. I turn over the idea of Weetbix for breakfast.

T and I drive towards the front beach. He commentates what he sees: poor jogging styles, that tradies get the ladies. I look up to see a cluster in high vis tucking into a mid-morning lunch of meat pies and sausage rolls. I am busy manifesting stillness and remain mostly silent.

The winter beach town is superior to its summer counterpart. Today is no exception. The colours are all marvelous melancholy ones. I can hear kettles coming to the boil six streets over. The winter beach town is for consuming one’s weight in tea then later, wine. The winter beach town is for contemplating the structure of a sentence and what Anne Boyer might mean when she writes, the satanic jewel of mortality on the shores of Venice, about her breast cancer. The winter beach town advocates for slow, hot lunches unlike those had in the city where they are hardly had at all; lunches that are almost entirely made up of carbohydrates, where melted cheese is not overlooked. In winter beach towns, people say hello to this body as it walks and it says hello back. 

A pack of seagulls trail in the wake of three elegant black cormorants. I drag my finger to disrupt the water’s surface and wonder how their submerged bellies can bare it. T points out a cloak-y stingray dormant in the shallows and I realise what is nice about winter beach towns is that the human will hardly disturb the marine. If the human does it is with the concentrated grace of slow freestyle. The rest of us are left to marvel from the sand at the limitations of our human bodies. This morning large crabs are washed up on the shore. Up close they look mutant and more dangerous than they are. T lifts one up, still alive I watch its claws explore the air tentatively. He throws it back in the water and I wonder if we have done the crab a disservice; if there is a reason she seeks land this morning.

On the third day of winter

I wake up still submerged in dream. I had been swimming laps in an otherwise empty pool. My body sluiced easily through the cool flat water, I made little commotion, my freestyling body gave way to an even ripple that hardly disturbed the edges. In the dream, T was in the grandstand watching me with intent, my swimming body aroused him. I know this as fact, dream-fact, as in the dream I moved between his gaze and my own; an insight I would so like to acquire in waking reality.

I wipe my eyes, remove sleep, and type Blairgowrie SLS camera into a search engine like the nice man at the beach told me to do yesterday if I wanted to see what the bay was doing at any one point in time. The image it generates is of a flat bay and I decide, at this juvenile hour of seven am, I am going to swim. I roll over to find T in the same state as me, his eyes a little goopy.

In the time it takes us to drink a glass of cold, cold water and make our way there, the wind has picked up to ripple the water’s surface. I stand waist-deep, my bottom half numb, trying to work up the courage to go all the way. I am relieved to see a grey head bobbing some twenty meters out. I don’t have a swimming cap and the icy water that moves through the hair follicles of my loose ponytail give me constant brain freeze. I have to stand to make it stop. I look toward the sand, empty of bodies. I wonder how many minutes exactly ‘going to the supermarket to get some milk’ translates to. I swim with my forehead angled up to the fading moon and go through all the steps: the driving, the car park, the locking of the door, the unfamiliar aisles, the checkout, the unlocking of the car, the driving back. I add in a mandatory cigarette. Twenty-five minutes, I gather, though I have no way of knowing how long it’s already been.

The wind picks up and the grey head is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if it has drowned, or simply swum on into another cove. Shadows reminiscent of stingrays force me to swim away the brain freeze. I think about what the milk is for. I focus on the fact that in thirty minutes time I will be thawing out with a hot water bottle against my chest while T flips crepes onto my plate.

On the fourth day of winter

I wake up to no wind at all. There is evidence that my body has begun menstruating overnight. I remain in bed dunking ninety-nine cent Oreos into a tall glass of cold milk. The window slits are ajar so as to let the sea in. In my hands, Anne Boyer talks about the inevitabilities of our flesh, all day long I listen with intent.