All we want to do is sleep, but when we lie down we can’t get comfortable. We keep thinking about the pressure of gases under the ground, boiling like water, lifting us up in our beds.
You have ideas for where you live, like you do for your children. You promise them safe, ordinary lives, better than your own perhaps but not too different.
It’s those dogs, the howling. That’s why we can’t sleep. Like something ancient, something animal, seeping up through the ground below us. The last time the dogs howled like that, it was after the sea. We can’t stop wondering what it means. What they know that we don’t. Whatever it is, the dogs can’t tell us.
We sleep in fragments, we wake like falling. Our bodies are loud, they insist on their aches, their coughs and tendernesses, sweats and shivers. Our lungs and hearts are stuck in place; they shout like prisoners. Our bowels rebel, our livers protest, and we wheeze, restless in the grip of air.
When the sea went away, when it gave us its dead like an animal’s gift dragged to shore, it felt like the end of the world. That was eight years ago, and the world’s still here. In the end it wasn’t so bad. We adapted to it, like we were supposed to. We were doing so well. After the worst had passed, it became just another mark, a dash on the rim of a clock face. The hands go round and round. Time doesn’t stop.
Money doesn’t either. Doesn’t matter where it comes from. It just flows and flows, finding the low ground, the crevices. Doesn’t matter which was real and which was promises, which was dirty and which clean. We’re in its river. We move with its logic. Growth, growth: the logic of the world.
We’re not stupid. We chose what to notice, what to think about, believed what we needed to. We prioritised. We were realistic.
We don’t want to think about the past, we want to move forward, time heals all wounds. But now we can’t get rid of it. The past, and the future. They rush together like tributaries, fan out again as a delta, spread through the world like blood.
We toss and turn, and the body of Asphaltica, her tar smell, launches at us, surfacing. She’s in bed with us, damp, grotesquely writhing. We can’t breathe, we thrash around, she covers us, we’re sweating. In so deep and up so high, the water always rising.
Then she falls away and we are stranded, just like the rest of them.
Sam should have warned us.
What she knows and hasn’t told us.
And Ivy now, what does she know? Why is she back? What is her message? We turn in our own moist warmth, in the fate of our bodies, which are old now, growing older. Time doesn’t stop until it stops for good. It only heals until it kills. If we could sleep, even for an hour. Just sleep, and be forgiven. Go down deep, and wake in safety.
But there’s no safe, not after tomorrow. We exist between emergencies, emergency responses, more emergencies. That’s what it’s like to be alive. Nobody comes to help until the worst happens, and often not even then. We’re lucky. We’ll be safe for a while, wherever we’re going, until the next wave crashes.
We sleep in shallow trenches; we dream of the sea. Her old permanent promises. The fresh smell of her. The edge of the world in our nostrils, the taste of salt in our mouths. We could go down and put our feet in the water, and listen to her sing to us. Something so far beyond the scale of our lives, so alive in its movement, its mystery. We miss it, and it still hurts that we can’t touch it, or be held again. That weightless light, too bright, too far, shimmering. This is a grief that goes deep, goes wider than any other. It travels over the horizon and keeps going, circling the wet world until it hits you again from behind.
We wake with salt in our mouths. The dead are still with you first thing in the morning. When the brain wakes, it is not too late. We’re still turning the sea’s loss over like a choice, as though it hasn’t happened yet. As though its moment is still waiting out there, able to be stopped. Grief plays these awful tricks with time. Takes you outside it, brings you back. Then memory mixes itself with the salt, and we remember where we are, and when, and we want to be sick. The taste of asphalt, the taste of rot, rises in our gullets.
The sea turned its back on us. Now the earth is turning against us, too.
All that’s left is the air.