Lost at Sea

The night sea journey is the journey into parts of ourselves that are split off: disavowed, unknown, unwanted … We must agree to exile nothing.

– Stephen Cope

The wind took off with the sunset—
The fog came up with the tide,
When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell
With a little Blue Devil inside.

– Rudyard Kipling, “The Eggshell”

I am on the highest deck of a ship, next to a white metal railing. I am five or six years old. I breathe in the wild sea air, the salt mist tangling into my hair; it’s a shock of blonde, cut by my mother with the blunt scissors. 

Down in the water, I look for witches sailing in their eggshells. If you don’t crush your eggshells, witches will turn them into boats. My mother makes us push a spoon through the bottom of the egg after eating it.  

I watch the undulation of the waves, folding themselves into the dark blue water. 

It’s the night ferry from England to France, across the English Channel from Plymouth to Roscoff. The overnight crossing takes 9 – 12 hours, longer depending on the winds or the roughness of the sea.  

It’s night. Pitch dark, only faint stars high in the sky. Storm clouds pass quickly over them. My mother has taken me out of the cabin up onto the ship’s deck. The ship lurches and sways.

“Look down,” she whispers. She presses her body against mine. I tremble with fear, squished against the edge. Then she lifts me and tries to make me stand on the railing. My feet totter about, trying to find a footing. I feel myself turning limp.

“I’m holding you,” she says. “It’s alright.” 

“Look for the light!” my mother says. “It’s there! It’s coming from the windows of his castle.” 

“Whose castle?” I ask.

“The devil’s castle.” Her voice is lifeless. 

My mother likes to tell stories that terrify me. I don’t know why she does this. She is supposed to be the safe place but she isn’t. She can’t provide that for me because she can’t provide it for herself. She is lost. I am a small child so I love her all the same.

Her eyes have gone from silver green to black. I look for the light in them – the light that is my mother, but it has gone out. 

She is inside one of her blackouts, the thin space before the body follows and she’s gone completely, crumpled on the floor and unable to move. My throat tightens. I feel abandoned although she is holding me. I want to cry and run away but I don’t know my way around the vast ship. 

My mother is a disconnected stranger. Deep down, I wonder if I am real. 

__________

There is another ship that sails alongside the one from childhood, sailing across time and tides. It carries the weight of the journey not taken. There’s a lullaby, a gentle rocking, a hush-a-bye song about pretty little horses, white horses clipping along in the waves. 

__________

My tiny mother is beautiful, her cropped blonde hair outlined in silhouette. She’s silvery, her own daguerreotype. The image is fixed, with a distinct aesthetic: black and white with a mirror-like surface.

She is a vacancy, an empty dance hall, cards stacked against her. All the men look in my mother’s direction and want to dance with her. 

When she drinks, my mother does not live inside her body. Her psyche lives outside, in the wind, on the sea.

__________

My terror of her does not register with anyone. We are not attuned, mother and daughter. In the childhood house, I watch her from hidden vantage points, gulping thirstily from the cupboard, crouched on one knee. 

I learn to become her idea of what I am, wretched and unwanted. I search for her in a dark corridor, sleepwalking in my yellow and blue nightdress. I am six or seven. Like my mother, I shut down inside myself. 

__________

I’ve been sentenced to a term from which I cannot escape: drowned; lost at sea. I am 23. My worst fear is that I drown. Perhaps I drown, like my mother, in alcohol, or perhaps I drown in the tidal sorrow I cannot break into something smaller. Either way, the ship goes down. I am lost at sea. No one finds me. 

When I drown, the searchlights criss-cross over the dark inky water. Day turns to night as the edges of me fade further into the ink-black water. 

You can hear the haunting, clanging sound of the buoys ringing out over the surface of the water. An echo follows the sound. The dark bobbing shadows indicate the best navigable channels. They reveal the deep waters and the location of shipwrecks. 

__________

Once we took the boat out far into the lake. I am 39. It’s early evening, the height of summer.

“We’ll wear life-jackets,” my boyfriend said, to reassure me. But once we set off, he took his off and tossed it in a pile between us. I kept mine on, tightly fastened. I sat upright like a vigilant child.

We found a flock of seabirds with white bodies and black capped heads. They were floating together, far out. We moved closer, barely making a sound. 

It had to be some sort of miracle; I held my breath. 

“Common Terns,” he said before I could ask. 

The birds were a sign of sorts, a promise our love would endure. I always looked for signs like that.  

“You often see them in large groups during migration.”

I wanted to be a bird, something real. 

He was a man who loved me: the woman with the pretty green eyes. 

But then I fell overboard. Green eyes turned black and lifeless. The end of us was coming.

__________

At school, I’m spaced out. I am seven or eight. We kneel in tidy rows on the hard wooden floor. Grey wool skirts tucked under knees, socks pulled up. It’s always cold. We have to sing the hymn about the sailors lost in peril on the sea. I’m drawn to the words of the song and the feeling they evoke, both familiar and frightening.

The restless waves, the foaming deep, the chaos and the tumult, the wild confusion. 

I don’t know that the images were recollections of something real because the memory of my mother and me on the ship was lost for the time being. 

The words of the song make a pretty sound escaping from my throat, out of my mouth into the cold damp room. 

“For those in peril on the sea!”

It’s the only time I make a sound at school.

“All rise!” The pretty feeling gets lost in the shuffling lines of us on the way to the classrooms.   

__________

“It’s just that sometimes when you drink you go to a dark, kind of remote place,” he says as we are driving away from the lake. 

“Things get a little funny.”

“I don’t know how to reach you there.”

I stare out at the road ahead, unable to speak, thinking about my relationship with my mother and the things that went unsaid before she died. 

I don’t know how to explain the pull of the dark place to him, the terror and the fright. I go there to commune with my mother; it’s how we check on each other through time. We travel through the realms, shadow and silver. I go through a portal into a trance.  

__________

I stand at the edge of the harbor. I am nine or ten. My father is with me. 

The waves leap up to touch the shiny wet granite walls. I see the bright green seaweed that has been dragged through the water; I stare at the slick boundary of the black water line. I feel afraid I will slip and fall into the water.

Out to sea, the fishermen have trawled their boats, casting their nets into the insistent and plaintive cry of the gulls. 

Next to the harbor, there’s a wooden sign with a small coin collection box. 

“Sometimes people are lost at sea,” my father explains when I ask about the box. 

“The lifeboats go to rescue them.” 

I stare at the white flag with the red cross; a gold crown above a gold anchor. I think about being lost at sea.

__________

Back at home, my mother is in the kitchen. She’s singing the song from the radio.

You shall have a fishy on a little dishy

You shall have a fishy when the boat comes in. 

Dance to your Daddy, sing to your mommy.

The bad version of her is singing the song. Reckless, swinging on the edge. The song is sung wrong with another voice that doesn’t belong to her. Her lips and teeth are stained dark red from wine.

My father opens and closes cupboards, slamming the doors, searching for the green bottles. My mother hums about the kitchen. 

__________

“A double?” I nod as no words are needed. I am 45.

“One more for the road!” 

The road gets blurry at times. My eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Walking home, I make bad decisions, choosing the long way through the dark woods or along the winding path by the river. Tree roots have grown out of the ground. Good for tripping and falling down a ravine. I carry my shoes.

At night, I dream I am out at sea. There’s no light, just an unfathomable darkness. I experience something being thrown open. The expanse of the sea contains the numberless dead, lost beneath the waves that keep moving forward without dissipating. Aboard the ship, the slicing waves never break. Because they are so chaotic and turbulent, I decide to jump from the deck.

I wake with a start, heart racing, trying to catch my breath.  

__________

On the upper deck of the ship, my mother wraps me in a soft blanket. I am four or five. The ship is going to set sail. Engines whir and hum to life, vibrating through the wooden deck beneath our feet. White foam below. Dark hull of the boat. The ferry lurches away from the swaying lights along the harborfront. 

My mother stands with me at the railing. She holds me close as we watch the water, the sea air against our faces. For her, all is spinning. She needs to lie down in the cabin below. My feet barely touch the middle railing. I can feel the cold, hard surface against my stomach. My mother holds me too tightly. She gazes blankly out over the water.

Distant, shadowy shapes of land fade into the horizon. Edges of white cliffs turn into indistinct sketches, blurring against the sea. The final piece of land disappears into the darkness. 

My mother tells me to look down, over the edge. She presses herself against me. She holds me even higher and tighter, telling me to look out at the castle in the water.

“Do you know who lives there?” Her voice is a slur. She sounds far away although she is close. 

I stay quiet. Afraid to speak. The words are stuck in my throat. I breathe into the blanket. 

“I’m holding you,” she says.  “It’s alright.” 

But I feel the terror that is my mother; it’s a threat that bleeds through time. 

Changing forms and spaces, my mother’s spirit ebbs and flows, in and out of love. 

In my own map of the world, there’s a ship on a night crossing, sailing into terror and despair. 

__________

At school, we learn about St. Michael the Archangel. I am 9 or 10. We are shown a painting of the Archangel after he killed Lucifer, who is a fallen angel. He stood over him, his enormous wings outstretched. The angel’s wings form an imprint in my mind. 

The angel comes at the hour of death to give each soul a final chance of forgiveness before it continues on its journey into the afterlife. Some of the souls need special consideration, so he weighs them on a pair of scales. 

I think about my mother weighing the potatoes in the market; the white fish placed on the square metal scale by the fishmonger, swooped up and wrapped in paper. The fish lie behind a window, arranged in straight lines, iridescent bodies touching each other’s sides. Silver mackerel, fresh red salmon. Large, round eyes stare out, their mouths slightly parted. There’s a smell of brine. My mother’s voice makes me jump out of my skin. 

“Come on! Stop staring.” My mother is always in a grand rush. I get a quick smack across my head for my curiosity.

__________

A moth flies out of a cupboard. Towards my face. I scream. Drop a glass. I always startle easily. I carefully sweep up the glass. Pour another. 

I travel to the other side, far from myself. The dark place becomes a remote forest. There’s no yellow there. No breadcrumbs; no way home. 

I steal into the darkness to understand it. A dense fog gathers around me. 

__________

One day my mother died; I was 13. We visited her behind the blue hospital screen in the cancer ward, after they took the lump out of her breast. By the summer she was gone, outlived by regret and remorse, three daughters, one son, and a husband who didn’t know what to do with us. 

My father threw away her clothes. Pale blue summer trousers, flared at the ankle. A black sweater, long at the sleeve and up to the neck, still carrying the smell of her perfume: bergamot, ylang-ylang, amber. She bought it duty free on the ship. Yves Saint Laurent, La Rive Gauche in the black and silver box edged in blue. The outfit haunts me because she wore it on the ship with high heeled sandals that were bad for walking in. They end up carried home or pushed inside the black shiny handbag.

My father found the half-full and empty bottles hidden in cupboards and wardrobes around the house. Some are tall and green, others are small and brown. He threw them all away, sighing deeply as he completed the tasks. 

My mother had drowned her sorrow for good. 

__________

My older brother was given the names of two saints, John and Michael. My mother chose the names to protect him against the drinking curse on the family. 

But he fell from a fire-escape. He went missing for four days and four nights. Then the body was found. 

The angels failed to save him when he plummeted to his death. He was 22. He drank too much Bacardi Rum from a silver flask. I was 14.

__________

All along, before we broke up, I wanted him to catch me. Only I couldn’t make myself fall. I lived in constant fear of losing him. It was a matter of time before he’d cheat on me, meet someone else. Fear is my anchor, embedded so deep I can’t free it from the seabed. It gets in the way of self-reckoning, understanding how I self-sabotage all things good. 

It’s summertime. Sister Bay. I am 43. 

“Just jump in the water!” he shouted to me. I stood at the end of the pier. Long red hair around small pale shoulders. My legs turned to lead. I could hardly breathe. 

“Come on! For Pete’s sake!” 

Tears streamed down my face. He swam back to shore, his expression dark and disappointed. 

Earlier we stood at the edge. 

“Let’s jump together. Take my hand!” But I was too scared, so he jumped in without me. 

He waded back to the beach carrying a weight of disappointment that wasn’t there before. 

A door was gently closed. 

I drank a stiff gin and tonic in the hotel bar by myself.

__________

I spend my days without things; only the emotions they evoke. An apricot velvet cushion cover: summer love, light filtered, a safe place. Everything will be alright. 

I crammed the cushion into the new cover to become an alternate version of itself. Inside the apricot lies the teal: demure, an abandoned French villa, crumbling from war and neglect. The swallows move in, nesting in the rafters and on the window sills. Once-deep colour fades to almost nothing. 

I’ve rigged up stars above my bed. Small dipper, big dipper. Tiny lights on copper wire. 

__________

A sense of myself receded on the night crossings. There was no option to run away or escape. No one to turn to, no place to hide. As much as I try, I can’t remember the scenes fully, just in scattered fragments, pieces from memories and dreams. I can summon the precise feelings of dread and terror, just never the exact sequence of events in time. When I try to remember, I slip into a disconnected world, anxious and guarded. 

Whenever it surfaces from the depths, I drown it. I hold the throat of the memory until it falls limp and sinks back into the water. Then I feel guilty, perform a resuscitation, give it the kiss of life. I can’t let go. 

I can’t tell a game from reality. I fail to see things that are apparent to others. Because I fail to see clearly, I make bad choices. In the bed, I make myself disappear. 

I journey into parts of myself that are split off, abandoned in a separate dimension. I travel on a moth’s wing, through the tunnel of a swirling glass tumbler. Sometimes the problem is disguised as a solution; I convene with a truth. I stare into the dark sky. 

__________

There’s a ship that sails in my dreams, across time, across the tides, without any crew or passengers aboard. You can see the play of light on the water’s surface. Cursed from her first voyage, now she’s a ghost ship, abandoned, derelict at sea. The waves slice through the sea like sharp knives, causing the water’s surface to appear broken, chopped into pieces.

###

Sarah Harley is originally from the UK. She works at Milwaukee High School of the Arts where she supports her refugee students in telling their own stories. Sarah holds a BA in Comparative Literature and French, as well as an MA in Foreign Language and Literature. Her essays have appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Idle Ink, The Thieving Magpie, Quail Bell Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her online here: https://www.sarahharley888.com