Readers of this edition may notice an unplanned preponderance of aquatic motifs and pieces. In this keenly prescient article, Isaac contemplates why we [i.e. Farrago] love to write about water. 

L

ook at the girl in the water. She imagines herself drowning, likes to test just how long she can hold her head underwater. Aloe vera gel over tan lines; sun-bleached hair with a terrible, sea salt texture; blue, yellow and a white-hot light; a growing distaste for her own body. But that’s just summer, isn’t it—a beginning and an ending, both.

Seagulls whoosh overhead, wings battering wind against her ears. She thinks it would be nice to fly but will settle atop the waves for now. Birds came from the ocean, same as us: water to sand to sky. There’s something addictive in drifting, in the bone-deep knowledge, in letting the ocean toss you to-and-fro. She lets the waves carry her, no way of knowing that she’ll avoid the water for a near-decade in years to come. 

To float is to give yourself over to forces far bigger than yourself. I think of the water and I think of everything from the microscopic to the mammoth, of myself as a speck of sunlit dust moving through the air. The sun shifts its focus and the dust flake is snuffed, crushed under the pressure of gravity and a thick, kilometres-high blanket of salt water. The ocean goes down so deep the pressure will crush you. There’s more to the water than drowning and sharks dwelling in the shallows. Isn’t it enticing to not know what else there is to find? Anything could be down there. Anything.

The ocean isn’t a subject that lends itself to a still life—deeply unchanging, but never in stasis. Impossible to depict in its entirety, whether that’s in words or oil paint: paintings of the Romanticists, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, art all around the world for millennia. We want answers we can’t fully have. Here is the unknown; there’s something magical in how it will always escape you. Write around it and around it and around it again, and each time you will have painted an entirely different image. 

My first painting: summers when I was young were coastal. My grandparents lived by the ocean and we’d stay with them for a few weeks each year. The beaches of my youth were quiet places of a washed-out blue. I never wanted to leave. One year, my father lost his snorkel at Wilson’s Prom. One minute it was there in the sand; the next, the waves had snatched it away. For reasons unexplained, I remained convinced we’d find them washed up one day, that the tide would return what it had taken. But water doesn’t like to do that. Evening waves wash away both flotsam and footfall. I think this is what makes sitting there feel more meaningful than it is, knowing the sand won’t remember you come tomorrow. At sunrise and sunset, the sand and water forget they’re opposing forces and come closer together; they brush against one another in a way that’s transitory, that carries you from the end of one moment to the beginning of the next. Watching the water feels like I’m letting something out to sea.

Still Life #2: In February, some friends and I embarked on a tumultuous, friendship-fracturing trip to Wollongong. One morning, a collection of us went to watch the sun rise over the waves. It might have been that it (momentarily) seemed that the world was ending, but I’ve vivid memories of perching by the rocks and watching the ocean swell with molten gold; the water was so heavy it made each minute sag, bringing about a pause in which to catch our breath.

Let me write you another picture: I’m at Half Moon Bay in the summer of 2024, and it’s the first time I’ve allowed myself in the water in a decade. I let myself sink below the surface, to see how long I can hold my breath now that I run on the regular. I also want to cry. How do you articulate this to the people that you’ve come here with? How do you tell them that they’re unwittingly watching brick after brick in the wall around your body dissolve into the salt water? I’d spent so long afraid of the beach and my own body, I stopped remembering my love for water. Blue has come back into being my favourite colour. I’d forgotten summer didn’t have to be a punishment.

One more: 12 months later, I’m adrift on my back at Brighton Beach and watching a storm crawl in. Waterlogged clouds turn a rageful violet. I’m all by my lonesome. I decide then and there I’d be okay if things just ended, with a sky struck with electric capillaries, lungs pumping in and out, cloud canopy alight. My ears sit below the waves, and all I hear is the blood running through them, the seashell rush of the sea. A beginning and an ending.

Someone stared at this water 10, 1,000, 10,000 years ago. People have traversed it forever. The waves suggest you’re not so different. We live in an era so conducive to isolating yourself it’s easy to forget there’s more than what’s directly in front of you. Take the water, for one. Take what lies beneath.

When will we stop writing about the beach? Maybe when there’s nothing left to say; maybe when fishing trawlers have turned over the last patch of sand; maybe when the sea has risen so high only the mountains can part it; maybe when the surface carries so much oil it swallows the sunrise. 

But for now, I’ll keep thinking about how I don’t see the coastline nearly enough; I’ll think about how the waves work their way into my writing whether I want them there or not. And I’ll wait for the water to swallow us up again.