early september: the ocean

waves are crashing and i, as per usual, am content

I’m writing to you today about the ocean, which perhaps deserves more admiration than it receives. Or perhaps more from me specifically, as I’ve spent much of my life feeling impartial towards it.

The thoughts that you’re about to consume were prompted by a Saturday spent in Santa Monica, where my friends and I beat the Los Angeles heat wave by wading around in the Pacific. I happened to be with my friend Georgie, who lives here now, but went to high school with me, and was the first person who showed me how to jump waves. While watching her swim with my other friend Asha, I felt this sort of full-circle moment that could only really be explicated by penning a love letter to the ocean.

I’m not someone who considers myself a woman of the water, but I have very distinct memories of the ocean from my youth. I was raised in Florida, but we rarely went to the beach. Such a trip was an occasion reserved for rare days we had off from school. I think this was in part because I didn’t really have any affinity for the beach, and I can’t remember ever being a child that begged to go back. I have always preferred cold environments; I would often rather be bundled up in a swaddle of blankets than being forced to strip down and sweat it out. But I still appreciated those moments with my family, even if I was sandy, hot, and uncomfortable on the car ride back.

After I moved to New Jersey, spending a portion of my summer with friends on the shore was rather inevitable. I’d enjoy the days in Seaside Heights, or Lavalette, though I usually preferred the parts of the day when we were just heading towards our respective showers or sitting down for dinner. There are many moments from those summer nights that left an imprint on my being, as they proved to me the strength of my young friendships and the love I could hold in my heart for women that had such a profound impact on my identity.

I recall sometimes (at random) that scene in Little Women when Jo takes Beth to the seaside upon hearing of her illness. I learned in recent years this has been thought a common manner of healing at various points in history, which feels to me as if it holds a certain weight to it. And perhaps that’s where my overwhelming sense of admiration came from this weekend: thinking about the fact that the ocean signifies this sense of health and love. In that same vein, I spent a night by the shore with my partner Skye this summer, and though we hadn’t planned for it, we talked on the shore until the sun went down. In speaking with him about my own vulnerabilities and fears, I felt as though it was healing a part of myself that I didn’t even realize was broken.

I like to think, then, that use bringing one another there is somehow an effort to heal one another’s ills and bring us closer to experiencing some form of joint happiness. The thought of that being true carries that sublime sort of beauty that feels too overwhelming to simply be attributed to alcohol or good vibes or volleyball matches or sunshine.

Maybe it really is an old wives tale, but I do buy into the belief that time in the ocean does wonders for the skin and hair. I always find that my freckled cheeks look best after a trip to the shore, and I love the way my hair waves right after I’ve been swimming in saltwater. They bottle products now to have the same effect, and I’ve tried them before, but they just don’t do it for me. And perhaps that speaks to how experience has more of an effect on our perception of beauty than any real, observable change we see in ourselves. Maybe it’s the truth that I just feel more beautiful because I could conflate myself with a mermaid for a moment.

Truthfully, I don’t like to think about all the creatures in the ocean. My friend Zoe is fond of sharks, and when she came to California to visit me this summer, she showed me this app that allows people to track sharks and their geolocations. I think that’s a very interesting concept even if I cannot ever imagine myself caring about random sharks enough to download it. Still, I suppose that sometimes I do think about how oceanic animals can move around the globe in a free fashion, and get rather perplexed at how they choose where they want to go. If given that amount of freedom, I think I’d always find myself stuck in some form of choice paralysis. So thank God I’m not a shark, I suppose.

On a purely statistical level, the ocean covers over seventy percent of Earth’s surface, and there are times when that concept alone is rather mind-boggling to me. Something around 80% of the ocean is yet to be explored, and that’s even more frightening. But there’s something very human about loving something that we do not know the full extent of, similar to how we love our friends or partners. In regards to the latter, there’s this quaint part of them that will always remain a mystery to us (often because it is also a mystery to them) and yet we love them in spite of this gap.

I don’t always know what’s touching my feet when I wade into the water, and regardless of how freaky the bottom of the ocean is to me, that doesn’t change the impact that the moment has on me. I rarely remember the discomfort hours later, and I suppose that same idea goes for the sand now, too. And for most annoyances in life.

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some songs that evoke ocean to me:

• amoeba by clairo

  • i fell asleep on the beach to this song on repeat once, and i think that will always be a core memory for me

• show me how by men i trust

• pool by samia

• andromeda by weyes blood