Hidden Depths

Only a reflection shows landfall. The promenade lights wash the sand, but only near the path… the day’s footprints and the rippled fingertip of wave-print tracing a history across its surface like the laughter lines or frown lines on a face. The sky, darkest navy – midnight blue at just exactly 11pm – with the slightest highlight stripe of violet, fading to the northern horizon as the day dies and the planets turn and the time drifts. Lights, floodlights, reflections of lights. The playpark and the café floodlit in a wash of green… empty, silent. A day’s worth of everyday dramas silenced with the dark. House lights and street lights… a bar and restaurant doing late-night weekend business, voices discernible distantly over the breaking waves. Laughter carried in ripples across the rippling shallows as the tide draws out for a chilly night at sea. The shallow laughters of false friends and faux amis… the clinking glasses of passing bonhomie between the people who’ll want to forget they ever knew each other tomorrow as they rub their eyes awake… Glasses half full and half empty and filled again with easy desperation, the fast-flowing camaraderie of Saturday night surging and breaking in a spring tide of voices and forgotten embraces… closing time is near…

Sometimes you can’t think straight for trying to think. Thoughts and possibilities crowd your mind like bank holiday tourists in a seaside town. This loss and that goodbye, this decision and that consequence, this betrayal and that misplaced trust – they set up their windbreaks in your mind, open their picnic baskets, then leave detritus all around them as they rush, screaming at the icy inhospitality, into the waves of thoughts that crash across your mind. Sometimes when you need to think, you just need to be somewhere empty, hoping that the echo-uttered silence will imprint itself, and spread calmness through your mind just as the sand-rake smoothes down the imprints on the beach, early on summer mornings. You hope the symmetry of the sound arc of a seagull’s cry will reflect itself in your calmed thoughts, just as the arc of lights along the curved seafront promenade is reflected tonight in the calmed sea now a stormy week has ended. Sometimes you need to see an empty beach, a midnight-blackened sea so submerged in its own darkness that it’s really just suggested by its sounds. The complexities of landfall are the complexities of daily life, the constructs of friendship and betrayal, profit and loss, definition and defined. At the last point of land before a horizon further north, your mind stills. Slows. The waves, crashing and smashing and destroying a few days ago, are lapping quietly now. It’s like the hurt that rips through your mind as destructive as a lightning bolt, but eventually calms to a memory… a scar that calms with time. The tide draws out into the midnight black – so far, at last, that you can no longer see the foam. But it will turn – in turn. The undercurrents are there. The rip tides draw tenacious and deceptive fingers through the calmness and pull you out into depths that you can’t see or measure. You’re lost among the darkness again and far from anywhere that you can stand, secure… Only a reflection shows landfall. Only a charted meaning calms your thoughts. Only knowing you’ll be hurt again makes you know that you’ve survived. And tomorrow, waves will follow the rulebooks of the tides, darkness will fade to light and light to dark, friendship will fade to loss and loss to life. For now, you’re lost in thought at the limit of what is solid underfoot… gazing into the midnight dark, pondering on hidden depths…