The Young Man and the Sea

He was a young man who looked out over the sea alone in his soft yellow woolen jersey, and he had spent the last three days with his eyes stinging from sea salt searching for a particular reprieve. For a while, an old man had taken in with him, and together they had watched over the sea, each burdened with his own depths, as though the sea were a mirror of aquatic occasion whose waves would release with each man’s own spirit. The old man wished to possess the sea, the young man wished to be possessed by it. The threads they frayed off these ideas supplied them with endless moments of friendship; each dissolved like salt in receding tides. The young man surveyed the sovereignty of the sea, and as so often happened, his heart felt like it would burst. He thought of his Cordelia, whose glassy eyes were the colour of the sea below a storm. She must be as deep too; what shallows could hide the contrasts of currents he found himself confronting in their most intimate moments?

The young man had grown up in a landlocked house, and had moved to a seaside city for his studies. Every day he made the trek by bus and foot to the same beach he was now upon. He would sit on the same bench, sometimes only for an hour, sometimes for half the day; the endlessness the sea possessed seemed an ideal canvas for a neurotic young ideologue to project upon. The old man, Jim, never arrived at the same time, and how he made it to the beach every day with his walker was unknown to the young man. As he looked out this day, he distracted himself from his problem by trying to tie together the threads that tempt a man to view the sea as his captor and saviour, his lord and his lady. But soon, he was at it again, musing over the nature of romantic love, how and why it eluded him, like some frightened beast whose desire to remain free brooked no more reason than his desire to capture it.

He heard Jim before he saw him. “Seems a bit choppy today,” said Jim.

“I hear there’ll be rain later, maybe even a storm,” the young man replied.

A fuzzy shape appeared in the distance, which Jim pointed to.

“Look, over there. Must be a yacht. Don’t see many of those these days,” said Jim.

“I saw one yesterday, before you arrived. I wonder if it’s the same one,” his companion offered.

“We used to get fleets of them in the old days. There was even a regatta of sorts, if you could call it that, for a while. Last one must have been about twenty years ago,” said Jim.

Eventually the young man said, “What’s a regatta?”

“Just some racing, they’d put out from about over there,” Jim said, pointing to where the harbour lay on the peninsula, “and race till about there, a few miles.”

“Oh right, I remember my mum telling me about those sorts of things, like little fairs they were.”

“Look, before we go on –,“ Jim stopped himself.

He put his left hand on the young man’s shoulder before continuing:“I’ve been…the wife’s been talking to me about these chats, she thinks – well, she says – these chats aren’t good for me. Gets me thinking about all sorts of things. The past, and whatnot.”

Jim smiled and waved back at an old woman passing by.

“So,” Jim continued, “I’m going to be a bit more scarce. I thought I should tell you; I owe you that much. It’s not that it’s not been fun, you remind me very much of myself when I was younger, as I’ve said, but I think I’m building up a bit of stress over all this, and at my age, I need to relax more.”

The young man looked at Jim and blinked a few times. “I…suppose I understand. Not a great time, of course –“

“No no, don’t get me wrong,” interrupted Jim, “we’re still friends, no one’s going to stop me from having the friends I please; I’m just not able to spend hours here with you talking about life and philosophy and all that.”

Jim stuck out his other hand for a handshake. The young man acceded, and his soft hand met the calloused hand of his older friend, ending in a strong pump up and down.

“Good luck with Cordelia my young friend, wish I could’ve helped more,” said Jim. And just like that, with Jim taking up his walker, the friends were separated.

Unhappy with the turn of events, this new crisis gave the young man something else to focus on. He wondered what Jim could have meant about stress, and he thought the allusion to the past was probably an excuse. In a matter of moments he turned a corner in his thinking and was convinced that the old man’s wife wanted Jim to have nothing to do with him. The constancy of his perturbed mood very easily turned back to the matter of his love life and how it was to be solved.

After a while the young man worked himself up to a fever pitch and made the decision to act, rather than think. At first there was a second-guessing of what would usually not be called a decision on his behalf, but as soon as he stood up from the bench he felt an inertia imparted upon him. He would go to Cordelia and confess his feelings, or at least say something. He would not die alone, not as he was: a young man. He was off the beach and down the road very soon after that. His body seemed to sense a difference in the mind; whatever was happening was giving him a physicality, something he could feel as he walked lightly to the bus stop a hundred meters away. He didn’t wait long at the bus stop, and amused himself by wondering about the lives of the few people on the streets around him – somewhere along the line in their lives they must all be compatriots in the struggle for love., He even patted himself on the back for smiling at a young child and separately, a homeless dog. What change! What exuberance, he thought, is brought to one when one decides to be a man of action.

He calmed down a bit on the bus ride over to the dorms in which Cordelia lived. He considered the possibility of outright rejection, but reckoned against it – they were fabulous friendly together, and she’d shown an interest in him, after all, that is what he was going there for. No, better to dive in. Today may be the start of something beautiful, an unencumbered consumption which would allow him to swim in the depths that resulted from the melding of two minds made for each other. And so the fever pitch built up again, so that by the time he stepped off the bus at the stop closest to the dorms, he was giddy with excitement.

Walking to the dorms seemed to release some of his energy, but still, it was with a spring in his step that he eventually landed outside her door, which he rapped upon three times. After thirty seconds with no response, he tried again. Soon, the door opened, and with it came a sea breeze and a vision of the girl he adored. Her hair was down and wavy, a black that flowed and seemed to never end as it shimmered in the early afternoon light. Her broad smile slightened when she saw him, but all he noticed was that it was a smile for him.

He said, “Yes.”

“Oh, right. And hello to you too. ‘Yes’ to what, then?” came the reply.

“Yes,” he repeated. “I…I will go to coffee with you.”

“Oh, of course. It’s just that…Mark is here – we’re about to head out actually.” She looked back into the room.

“Well, I was hoping –“

He stopped as Mark approached. A glint of sunlight as Cordelia turned, and the young man noticed her eyes were, in fact, a deep hazel.

“Hey big fella, long time no see,” Mark said with a smile.

“I’ll text you later,” Cordelia said to the young man.

And with that they pushed past him, closed the door, and were off, holding hands swinging with jaunty steps. The thrum of blood in the young man’s ears worked up for a second as he felt a surge of regret, that he’d just caught himself in the middle of falling in love with a stranger. She was not the sea, but a lake to drown in. He watched them till they turned the corner and were out of sight.

He tried to stay calm as he walked back to the bus station. Occasionally he would clench and unclench a fist, and focus on anything but her. Anything but her smile. Her derision? Anything but her derision. Her nonchalance? Anything but that. And so it went, as he walked the mile past apartment blocks and playgrounds, commuters and wanderers, acutely aware of the feeling of his body. Sometimes he thought he smelled salt on the air, but he didn’t stop to wonder about it, just focused, head slightly down, on getting to the bus and not thinking of her.

On the bus many things unraveled. At first he sloughed off terrible thoughts reluctantly, but they reached the benefit of habit quickly, till at last he nurtured them as one worshipping the fruit of poisoned soil before ripeness. His patience was gone. His alacrity of mind laid buried under layers of self-doubt and the heavy atmosphere of grief. Love is not the thing that had bloomed, nor would it; of this finality he was certain. When he eventually looked up and out of the window he registered the streaks of rain as nothing more than the assurance of his misery, the final piece in the growth of his turmoil. He was certain of what it would eventuate, he thought, but even so, when he stepped off the bus and took off his shoes and stepped onto the beach, he felt surprised. He walked toward the sea. With every step he grew more surprised, till at some point he exhausted its supply and began to feel brave, and at its zenith, at its exhaustion, he felt proud.

Later he would recall walking past Jim and his envoy of curmudgeons, past faces familiar and unfamiliar on his way to his destiny. He would remember many details of that late afternoon far into his life.

The young man thought he heard Jim frantically calling to him, he imagined him waving to him, but soon the din of the approaching surf drowned out and replaced his senses, real and imaginary. The young man walked into the sea, feet first into a swirling cascade of foamy water that chilled him to the bone before buoying him and swallowing him entire. The sound of the storm muted in his ears before abating completely, leaving him in the tranquil surrender of his new surroundings. This moment of release seemed to enter his head and closed eyes and spread in a cool network of chilled veins, turning him into a thing of all-feeling till a fire well-stoked erupted in his lungs and all was black and all was fear. There was no breathing that was not every part of him swimming in the immense plasma of suspended panic that entered him at every pore and filled his limp form with unanswered terror. Till a moment of comfort beckoned to soothe, and the flailing stopped. Then for a while there was no time, then there was the ringing in his ears, a return to sensation, his body clasped along various intervals while the heaving of his chest punctured the fabric of stillness his body struggled against.

The large man who had pulled him from the surf nearly collapsed once out of the water. He dropped the boy onto wet sand just out of reach of the waves and began to pump the boy’s chest with his substantial hands. He was panicked, and Jim, who had lagged behind, urged him to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A young woman nearby with her boyfriend called for an ambulance, but other than that, everyone nearby felt restrained, living within their fears. Passersby further ashore looked on agog, some with hands pressed to their mouths, or over their eyes to see better. It was a good thirty seconds of pumping the boy’s chest before water spluttered out of him, and his rescuer continued to pump the boy’s body till he saw more signs of life. When it was clear that the boy would live, some onlookers picked him up and carried him to his bench, where they placed his tender, saturated form upright.

Jim rushed to his side and clung to the boy in his soaked clothes and rocked him backwards and forwards inside the new tumult of activity, the cacophony of concern and worry, whispering so that his lips touched the boy’s ear, holding on alone to the passed emotion of the averted tragedy. The boy would be fine.

“You have been baptized by death,” Jim was saying as he continued to rock the boy.

Someone put a thin blanket around the boy, who was staring off at the water, his face furrowed with the salty damp of the vastness he had been pulled from. His fringed hair was a cover from the spittling rain, and so his face held the sea behind green eyes until the first post-mortem of survival spilled out a tear and from then on nothing could stop his weeping. The old man stroked the boy’s hair back so that the rain fell on his face and no one could tell how much he had cried or that he was crying at all. As the sea stormed and the boy stared at her and the rain fell and people circled, Jim began to speak.

“The sea commands no respect from anyone who has known her. All who have been and seen and known know only fear. You’ve been and you’ve come back but you will never go again ‘less it’s to never come back. For the terror you’ve been imparted you will either never want to know again, or be swallowed up by it. It’s enormous and deep beyond the imaginings of every man, woman, and child, in every direction; it is more and you will never be enough for it, even should you offer your entire self to it. One cannot respect something so terrible, something which lives beautifully in the eyes of those who have never been consumed by it.

We are brothers now, you and I. I too was once called to it. I was a little older than you. I fell and she caught me and I struggled in her arms and she drifted around me with currents so smooth and strong that I knew that there was only one god and she is the sea. I remember the fear, I remember grasping with my hands as though I could summon air out of water and scoop it into my lungs, and I remember surrendering and wanting to be with only her. Until she spat me out, onto a shore not three miles from here, and I’ve hated her every day since.”

Two men with a stretcher approached, and Jim began to withdraw his embrace. The boy and the old man watched the grey and stormed-upon sea as waves roiled past their gaze to become one with itself.