Things and thoughts far away

Friday Fragment #6

‘I grew up in the sea and poverty was sumptuous, then I lost the sea and found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable. Since then, I have been waiting.’
The Sea Close By, Albert Camus

I fell in love with a Cornish girl, and then her Cornish family. Unlike Camus, I found the sea late, and temporarily lost the city. I left poverty behind too, but know and savour its memory – cowed still by a shadow that has reached long, as the child I was always knew it would. The sea connects shoreline with shoreline; land with distant land; people to faraway people; anxiety and worry to hope and a vastness of other sensations, made less remote by ebb and flow and time and tide. Its closeness can momentarily banish the most difficult thoughts and fears, can soothe and ease those things which feel intractable. I started writing in the last hours of one day and came back in the early hours of the next. I am with family and friends by the sea for a few days and that inward and outward pull of the water feels like a force capable of softening sharp stone.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.