Ghosts Upon The Sea

It was all I had left of my mother. A piece of who she was but also the curse that took her from us. Growing up, I never thought a building could hold so much power over a life, but I was about to find out just how far past my limits I could be driven. And all at the hands of a lighthouse. A beacon of hope was to be my undoing.

My mother had been a beacon of hope for many in our little seaside town. She was never shy about giving, both of her time and of what little financially we had to spare when it came to our neighbors.Only that giving spirit rarely if ever seemed to grace me with its presence. How I’d longed for my mother to wrap me up in her arms, to marvel at her own child the way I’d seen her bask in the light of others. She had a heart for children, as long as they were not hers. Well to be more accurate, as long as it was not me. My brother seemed able to carve out a spot for himself just fine when we were young. He needed her in ways I simply did not. I needed to find my own way in the world, which meant I was far more independent than Zachary. But in truth, I had to be. I had to figure out from a very young age, how to make my own space. How to exist outside the cage that was our lighthouse, our home. A port in the storm for anyone who wasn’t me, it seemed.

And so when we found out mother would not last the year, that the cancer had grown too progressive to combat any further, a piece of me broke away. She burrowed her way far beneath the surface and I stopped being who I had fought so hard to become. I stepped back into the cage, moved back into the lighthouse with my mother, both to help her run it and to help her find her way to death. It was as though I was keeping the lighthouse going so the grim reaper herself could find her way to my mother. Could take her from me before I’d been able to understand and know her for myself.

We had butted heads for years, to the point that I needed to put an ocean between us in order to finally find peace. We needed that distance so she could be who she was, and I could stop hiding who I had become. When the call came and there was no hiding from the inevitability of her passing, I tucked away who I was and morphed into who she needed me to be. I left a piece of myself in that cottage I’d shared with my girlfriend for two years in the picturesque mountains and valleys of the town of Tjørnuvík.

When I discovered the Faroe Islands in the first few months of traveling the globe, I was running from my own shadow.Finding this town, finding a place where the quiet forced you to spend more time with yourself than the hustle and bustle of a bigger city would allow, gave me the peace I needed to take off the mask I’d been wearing my entire life. That removing of masks? It was far from pretty and at times, I wanted to give it all up and go back to who I’d been. She wasn’t comfortable or fulfilling, but it was a role I knew how to play. I knew how to be Ester’s daughter. I knew I could climb back into my own skin and be the Terrwyn my family tolerated. But meeting Tlalli changed all of that. She changed me without even meaning to.

You know those stories we all read as teenagers? The ones in which the shy, broken girl finds someone to be her friend and then finds herself in turn? They become the best of friends until one day, one of them wakes up to the fact that they’re falling in love. Almost as if it were inevitable. Fate, if you believe in that sort of thing, which I didn’t. But how could I deny what was right in front of me? Tlalli had no reason to stick around. She saw what was beneath the surface almost immediately, and yet she did not run. Did not hold it against me for a single moment because she understood what it was to have to unmake yourself. To have to pull yourself apart at the seams in order to fully blossom. As a butterfly bursts from its cocoon, so too I had to break free of my own.

I’d worked harder than I thought possible to break free of this place that was now pulling me back in. When I said goodbye to Tlalli, I said goodbye to who I’d become in the light of her love. I dimmed myself down as best I could, but was there ever any hope when even my very name stirred the pot with my mother?

My name had been gifted to me by my father long before I was even conceived. Terrwyn, meaning fair and brave, and he was. My father was fair, brave, even tempered. He was all the things my mother needed and together, they were unstoppable. She had broken free of the cult her parents raised her in and was ready to be her own person, until my father vanished. The sea claimed him on the eve of my fifth birthday, and with him went the life I’d known. With him went safety, security, laughter and togetherness. He had been the glue that held our family together. He was the one person who could get through to my mother. Who could convince her it was worth the trouble to be truthful to ourselves. To dare to live lives outside the cult teachings and find fulfillment in our own ways. The sea took my father, took my family, and then took my mother right along with him.

Little me didn’t understand any of it. How my mother could go from the sort of smile that feels like home, to the kind of coldness that cuts both ways. When Zachary was born a few months later, I’d hoped the joy of his birth would last. That things could go back to how they were before we lost father. Spending time together reading, tending to the lighthouse as he prepared us for the day it would become our responsibility, and listening to music from his childhood loud enough to get us into trouble with Sheriff Miller.

Where losing father was like having all the wind knocked out of my tiny body, losing mother I assumed would feel like finally catching my breath. I’d be free from her expectations and constant disapproval. Free to proudly be myself outside the confines of my life back in Tjørnuvík. But it had been four months since she passed, and I was no more free or relieved than I had been when I arrived back in the sleepy little town of Brighten Point. I was caught in my mother’s shadow, which reached further than I’d ever imagined it could.

She was everywhere I went. In the house of course, but also all the places I’d gone growing up to escape the pressure of being her greatest disappointment. In the faces of the people who had adored her, the friends and family who never had any indication of what was going on in that lighthouse when I was growing up. They all knew her as this woman of light and love who had been taken suddenly. How could I blame them for grieving her openly when the version of her they all loved had died in my eyes decades before? I could not grieve who she was, but I was very much lost in the depths of who I’d hoped she could become. When she passed, I lost the hope I’d held onto for dear life in my years away. And as the waves crashing on the boulders lining the cliff outside my window cut through the silence, echoing endlessly, I finally broke. I broke wide open and the only thing I knew to do was to run outside and down to the beach. To try to find my escape in the places I would walk hand in hand with my father, on the nights I was more than mother could handle.

Standing there on the shore, it was all I could do not to unleash a scream that had made a home at the very depths of my soul, in the months since my mother had past. It was a primal instinct that took more of me to hold back than I had left to give. When all I wanted to do was release. To set her loose upon the ocean breeze and find freedom once and for all. 

Just as the sharp edges of the cold November air began to shred my lungs, there she was. Appearing some twenty feet from shore was the outline of a woman walking towards me. But how could that be? How could she be twenty feet out and yet fully above the water? It was as though the sea bent itself to her will, giving up its own nature in order to succumb to her presence. This is likely the moment we all scream at our television screens for the protagonist to run. To put as much distance between themselves and whatever ominous creature has them locked in their sights, but my body was no longer my own. I was trapped, locked in tight with no hope of escaping her gaze.

There we stood, locked in each others sights as neither of us dared to budge. As I finally lifted my hand to push back the hair the wind had blown into my eyes, so too did she. I stepped to my left, she mirrored that as well. It seemed I controlled her. A small comfort when alone on the beach in the darkness, but it seemed if I wished it, I could turn and walk away without another thought of her. Only something held me back. I tried to step to my right, only to find my feet unreceptive. It was as though a static had developed in the line of communication between my mind and my body. I could move, but it took a great deal of effort on my part. I considered attempting to walk towards her, giving in to my own sorrow and letting the sea claim me as it had my father, but even that choice had been taken from me.

As the beam of light from our lighthouse made its way back around to us, she vanished. All that remained was the outline in my minds eye of where I had seen her. It seemed over all at once. So quickly resolved to the point that I assumed I’d finally gone mad. That all the unexpressed grief had taken a toll and claimed my sanity for my having been unwilling to offer my screaming tears. The light continued across the water and just as I turned to leave, a chill came over me.

“You abandoned me,” she howled, now inches from my face. Her anger was all I could feel, replacing the sensations of the cold sea breeze nipping at my skin with a fire unlike any I had ever experienced. Her rage blazed brightly, unbridled anger emanating from her very being, in ways I had longed to my entire life. Where once I felt my own grief building, now all there was, was her. All encompassing, seemingly omnipotent and refusing to release me from whatever trance she had placed me under. I wanted to scream out to her. To match her anger with my own, calling upon my own indigence at the accusation of leaving behind someone I did not even know. And then I saw her. The beam from the lighthouse danced across us once more, revealing her face. I surely would have collapsed in upon myself, had she not been holding me steady.

There, inches from my face, I saw my own. Where my grief was quiet, hers was palpable. As the sea stirred behind her, I wondered if she controlled even that. If she had somehow taken possession of us both, only to turn us against one another at any moment. The pain in her eyes as they burned an inhuman shade of amber that felt just as familiar as it did alien, had me completely captivated. I wanted to know more just as much as I wanted to run as far as I could from her. Wanted to reject her and take her into my arms in equal measure. It was an odd feeling, seeing yourself so clearly. As I studied her face, her body, I began to see all the markings matching my own. Places she had taken on pain, holding it for others because she was willing to be hurt in lieu of being authentic and risking harm to another. I could see in her, the pain I carried within myself. There on the surface, clear as day, was everything I had spent a lifetime hiding. The longer she held me captive, the more I saw. The deeper our connection grew until I could feel her stepping into me. 

I instinctively slammed my eyelids shut, bracing for the pain of her passing through me, only it never appeared. She stepped into me, made a home in my body and as I opened my eyes, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I heard the screams as though they were in the distance. Felt the sorrow carried on the wind as the woman’s screams reached my ears, only to suddenly realize they were my own. I could not release my pain alone, and so she came to me. I could feel her within me, guiding my thoughts as the screaming continued. Felt her warmth as I collapsed upon the sand, the water lapping at my knees as I leaned forward, resting my head on the wet sand. I wanted to go with her. I felt the pull of the sea as though my father was calling me home. I wanted death to return for me. Begged as I screamed for an ending to this endless ache and just as I gave in to her, as I stopped fighting against the pull, the screaming stopped.

I felt a hand take mine, interlocking fingers, and as I opened my eyes I was greeted by what seemed to be the five year old version of myself. There I was in my bright yellow dress, which I had picked simply because it was my father’s favorite color and I knew his smile and approval would be enough. His seeing me, loving me, that was all I wanted in the world. It was in this dress that I watched in horrified confusion as my mother collapsed on the living room floor, screaming out his name for what felt like a lifetime. It was in this thin, summer dress that my mother drug me up the stairs of the lighthouse in the middle of the night two nights later, telling me we had to call out to the sea to return him to us. I stood there with my mother, screaming “Papa, please come home” as she screamed “Malick, I cannot go on” even louder. We screamed until tears ran down our faces, the moisture freezing to my little cheeks in the December air. When I begged her to let me go inside for my coat, her grip on my wrist only tightened until I screamed out in pain.

But my mother would not relent. Her grief consumed her and where my caring, protecting and attentive mother once stood, there was a woman driven mad by her own pain. The lights of Sheriff Miller’s patrol car didn’t even catch her attention. It was not until he was up on the platform of the lighthouse, peeling my now broken wrist from her grip, that my mother returned.

“Ester? Ester it’s Aaron. I know you’re hurting. I can’t imagine how I could survive losing Sarah, but you have to let Terrwyn go. Your daughter needs medical attention—“ he begged. My mother refused, and so it was in Sheriff Miller’s arms I found my way back to the safety of the ground and off to the hospital to have my broken wrist set. And that is the double edged sword of small town life. I felt safe in Sheriff Miller’s arms, because I had known him all my life. The town felt safe sending me back into that lighthouse alone once my arm was in a cast, because they believed my mother to be a kind and good natured woman who would surely take back up her role as my caregiver.

As the little me sat beside me, I knew all at once that I never wanted my mother to die. Never wanted her gone from my life as much as I needed her to want me. I needed her to love me as she did before that night, but she was never coming back. And now, neither was I.

I froze that night on the beach. Laid upon the sand, wrapping my arms around that small and still innocent version of myself as the lighthouse guided death to our door once more. I refused to feel my own pain, and so my grief came back to take even more than it required. If only I had been willing to face it all, to face myself, perhaps these ghosts upon the sea would not have had to come for me.