The Undertow

By Sydney Guida

Today, before light rose, you swam in the ocean like licorice both in sheen and in shade, and you were fifteen feet from a shark, without your knowing. There was an undertow beneath the roiling water; I felt it cast hands about my lanky ankles; I never did mention it to you, and because you never made any comment, I figured you did not notice it, and that I fell victim to its pull alone. 

Today, as you sat on the beach, knees folded to your chest, the lemon sunrise spilling over the horizon, I stared at imprints of your feet in the sand, leading to our tawny towel half-opened, and I wondered just how long they would be there, without your knowing. If I am earnest, I believe that I am always more alert, more conscious than you—and does this make me arrogant? 

The sugar foreheads of each foamy wave sighed, keeling over and groveling at our toe tips for a moment before retreating, slinking back to their body. The ones further out in the fetch bowed and bucked like lateen sails. Seaweed, feathery and serpentine, climbed the sand, and three frenetic sanderlings gathered to pick amongst its coils, trawling through for something to eat. 

“I don’t want to go home,” you admitted, all Pennsylvania-country eyes, which lazily blinked in and melted to the shape of the cloying Carolina air. 

You insist your eyes are only brown, but they are autumn leaves, as they shutter from their green to cinnabar. There’s an in-between to be found there, roaned, a clumsy, effulgent amber dancing, open and wide. I thought of this, without your knowing, while I craned my head to look at you. Your face glowed with morning; the wind licked your hair into it. 

I don’t want to go home. 

It was said like it was pulled from you—like you had been caught unwillingly at the end of a fishing line and reeled upward, toward the blinding sun. There was an undertow swelling beneath the remark; it was quicklime, swift and sharp, and cleaved our two figures, our two understandings, where unshed words now coursed through the rift, sat in our jaws like boulders; I refrained from regarding it because you did not. The ocean never reared you the way it reared me. Maybe this is why you had not noticed all of the things I did. 

And remind me how we met again? You see—I think I’ve forgotten. It was long ago, when we shared a town, and when I molted from it. 

“I don’t blame you,” I said, with a lower lip pressed forward, and grinned.

Hurling a playful shoulder into my shoulder, you smiled, innocent and unaware and far away, round cheeks pretty, blushed. I pressed my knees to my lips, and turned to the waves, their peeling and peeling and peeling away from the outward fetch like garlic cloves, like pedals. You had caught summer between your teeth, and I wanted to kiss it from you.

I didn’t. I wouldn’t. Instead, I chewed on that want, and a million other wants—and the spit of my mouth was the spit of the saltwater and the steady churn and crush of the undertow. And won’t you say something? Can you not feel it, those incessant, wild, cat-clawed thumbs of its uncouth desperation, its impending breath running up your rib rungs? Am I forsaken in my rolling and my tussling and my straining, in my vying to will it from my feet? 

“It’s always warm where you live,” you said.

It was not what I wanted to hear, because it was not the undertow nor the shark nor the complicated hue of your irises, but I thought it was kind nonetheless, and ruminated over it with fond curiosity. I knew you would be gone soon. The sky had been collecting clouds for a while now, and they folded softly over each other, pillowed and the color of a ripe and delicate apricot. And I knew you would be gone soon. I didn’t need to say this. We knew it was there. We knew what it was. I didn’t have to say it. You didn’t want me to say it. 

To steal away any silence that may have allotted contemplation, I stumbled my way through an antidote about my first encounters as a girl meeting this ocean. I would wade into the shallow water alone, watching the crystal, white-capped tide toss itself upon my legs, and glance over my shoulder to see my mother, lounged with theatrically-large butterfly sunglasses and a red-trimmed sunhat, peering from her magazine and beaming at me. I enjoyed the intimacy of it: She granted me free rein to discover what I could. Feeling the tug of the bumbling tide as it shrunk back, I closed my eyes, and imagined it pulling me away, too. When I opened them, I could’ve sworn that I had been swept further from my mother’s smile; that, with the receding, the dragging of the sand beneath my shell-scraped heels, I, too, was taken deeper into the fetch. Feeling as though I had discovered a power within myself, I staggered at the pace of the water below, its inhale, its exhale, its inhale again, its the filling of breast and lung and rib, and I was breathing too, like the heaving sea, and farther—breathing as I had a moment before toward my mother, but several feet away now, and with a new and profound sense of self that made my body feel like it was of something more than earth. I never did move. I wasn’t farther away; I wasn’t going anywhere. I told you of my bewilderment when I learned this, and you laughed. The furling waves laughed, roared with you, their tongues hanging from the sides of their mouths like giddy dogs.

And so it was: Our toes in the butter sand. The birds of black and narrow beak drawing mole crabs from their burrows, wings oaring through the milk sky. The tender slosh of a careening wave there, looking for a place to land its forehead. Grainy, pruned fingers; nails broken and filled with seashore. 

I love you. I wish there was an overarching meaning to all of it. I wish I could excuse the way I feel about you in the strained name of some great metaphor or symbol. But it is as simple as this. The way I love you is as simple as this. 

Yes, I chewed and I chewed and no matter the churn and crush I could not swallow it. I will keep it from you, and I will lay my insides in it, and I will wonder something rich and raw: What would scare you off, what would scare you off, if you knew, what would scare you off—the shark or me? 

All without your knowing. 

–

Sydney Guida is a 17-year-old from Pennsylvania. Her pieces are often lyrical, introspective, and rich in sensory details. She looks to become a screenwriter.