The Summer The Ocean Forgot Me

They say the sea never forgets. But I wonder now, and I sit on the lip of the world with my pen trembling against vellum paper, if it ever has.

It was summer 1954. I was ten, nearly eleven, all knobs and knees and terrified of deep water. My parents rented the same salt-bleached cottage every year in Ashwood Bay, a town too small for maps but big enough to have secrets. I remember the heat curling off the sand like specters, the sunburn on my shoulders, and the endless expanse of time that only children possess.

That was the summer I knew her.

Or at least, so I thought.

She appeared on the beach at low tide every day at the same hour: 3:33 p.m., not a second before, not a minute afterward. She never spoke my name. She spoke peculiarly, speaking things that did not necessarily mean anything, like "brinebone" and "kelp-heart" and when I asked her where she was from, she said, "Below the hush, where memory sinks."

She had black hair that flowed like water with streaks of seawater no matter how parched the day. She refused to blink. When I asked her why she always showed up at low tide, she smiled and whispered, "That's when I breathe."

We built towers with driftwood, buried dead jellyfish under shell gravestones as small as pebbles, and screamed our names down conch shells to listen to see if they bounced back. I never told my parents about her. I have no idea how I knew, but I shouldn't have.

She was summoned from the sea itself, a fabled being of lust. She never required me to explain myself—she already knew.

This story isn't really about her.

It is about Elijah.

He was the kid who lived two houses down, the widow woman's son who never smiled. He was lanky and tall, thirteen years old, with a wild shock of red hair and freckles that seemed to explode like galaxies. He was the first boy I ever ached to be near and didn't know why. We played gin rummy on the back porch at the end of summer evenings, sometimes being so close our knees touched. I remember once, when the cicadas screamed in the trees, he looked at me too long.

He didn't say anything. Neither did I.

And yet, I remember that air changed, thickened.

There was one day—we were knee-deep in the surf, throwing a ball around, both of us wet and smiling. Elijah paused, smoothing his hair out of his eyes, and said, "You're kinda weird, you know that? Always staring out at the water like it's gonna have something to say."

I remember flushing, suddenly feeling the weight in my chest. I wanted to speak—to define the ocean inside of me. Instead, I splashed him.

He splashed me once more, and that was it.

There was a moment that night. We were side by side on dune grass, staring at the stars burning steadily overhead. He leaned over, swished a strand of grass from my hair, and said, "You're not like the others."

I held my breath.

And then he turned over, said goodnight to me, and ran back toward the cottage, not once glancing back.

Elijah never saw the girl. I spoke of her to him once, and he laughed as if I were joking. That hurt more than it should have. So I stopped talking about her. Yet I wished he could have known her. I thought that if he saw her also, it would validate that she was a real person. That *I* was a real person.

Today I question whether she was ever a girl to begin with.

Now I wondered if she was me.

She asked me, on the final afternoon, to stay. "Let go of the land," she told me. Her cold wet fingers were in my hand. "You belong to the hush."

I ran.

I did not go to the beach the next day. Or the day following that.

When I returned, the tide never went back out again. Not ever. Not in seventy years.

The townspeople describe it as a climate thing. Something about currents and melt and science. I know the ocean is waiting, biding its time.

I write this now in the same cottage, walls twisted with age, salt on the windows. I stood beside one of our driftwood spires this morning, half-buried in sand, the conch shell at its top humming when I leaned my ear against it.

"You said you'd be back," it said. Or maybe it was the wind.

The village is smaller now. Half of the shops are shut down. Some of the houses have been occupied by the advancing tides. Rumors of relocation. Retreat. But I remain.

Sometimes I have a vision of someone—of me, of her—walking backward into the sea, arms outstretched, mouth full of salt. I wake up panting, bathed in perspiration, with the sea crashing louder in my ears than it should.

I have no clue what ever happened to Elijah. He quit. Or maybe he didn't. I remember the sensation of his hand on mine when we were playing Go Fish. I remember thinking about what would have happened if I had been brave enough. If I'd let him see me the way I saw him.

I imagine him at times as an old man, too, in some distant city, living a quiet life and grandchildren. Maybe he remembers me as some peculiar child with seaweed in his hair. Maybe he doesn't remember me at all.

Once, years later, I believed I saw him. I was in a bus station, waiting for a trip to nowhere at all, when a red-haired man streaked gray walked by. He looked at me, his eyes slitted like he was attempting to remember me. Then he continued walking.

I didn't yell out. What would I have yelled?

Maybe she was the part of me that hoped. Maybe when he laughed, she drowned. Maybe when I ran, she sank.

But I wasn't ready.

Maybe we all have our own waves. Some of us just never return out.

And some of us were always bound to be lost.

The waves are closer now. I can hear her in them.

I think I shall venture out to encounter her, this time.

I am ready to remember what the sea never actually did forget.

And maybe, if the sea is kind, she shall remember me as well.