Louis Glazzard
There’s this small coastal town you visited when you were seven years old. Ice cream dripping down your chin and onto the pavement, that glassy stone staring up at you in bubblegum pink. The barely lucid memory of the sun beaming over you. Hands pressed into the mounded rocks. Everyone scooped molluscs into their buckets and traded them later, on the coach journey home. Small trinkets. Significant moments.
Then you visited again when you were fifteen on a school trip and learnt about the monarch who lived in the castle that is crumbling on the top of the hill. The conservationist museum felt stifling, hot breath and teenage anxiety leaving your mouth. You weren’t staring into the display cabinets and learning, you were thinking about all of the places you’ll go and the boy who sits opposite you in Biology that meandered over the beach. You trailed behind him, trying to act calm. Cool. Unbothered. Listened to the teacher on the beach and watched the back of the crown of his head.
Then you went back at eighteen with your first boyfriend, got fish and chips and pressed the fork into the batter. The waves beyond you clawing up the cliff. So romantic. So perfect. You threw chips over the edge and watched them twist on the way down like flakes of snow. Dissipating as they met the swallow of waves. The potato broke up and swirled into the water. Next to you his mouth opens and screams into the distance of the skyline and you want the world to swallow you both up and entwine the two of you together. You hold hands. Stare into the empty blue. Salt water misting your face. On top of the world. Later you go down to the beach and the blanket of stars spill over your eyes and your heart is pouring with an abundance of beauty. How small you both felt, staring up at the sky and into the black empty of the waves beyond you. All so finite.You kissed and the seagull swooped over you into the distance and out. Glinting lights from the pier in the distance shimmered over your smiling faces.
Then when you were twenty one you went back for a hike after your father died and tried to think about anything other than him not being with you. In the seaside cottage, you looked out into the shoreline and the beach that had all of those memories. You asked yourself if it looked closer, more clawing. Smaller and closing around your fist. You repented and told yourself it was how you were feeling at the time. Studied the night sky and said some final goodbyes.
Life gets so busy and now you’re forty six years old and you remember it. The fish and chips, the saltwater wet on the lips. The castle. The walks and the winding paths and the ice cream. All of it is so perfect. You start to plan a trip, pull an old map and etch your route into the sticky paper. You put your keys in the ignition and tell your husband to get in the car. On the journey you sing and your dog pants in the back seat. You breathe, thinking about the destination. When you get there you are so happy to have a moment of peace, a slow swelling. You hold your dog in your arms and show them everything you know to be true, pointing at seagulls and their beaks.
You are sixty two and you think about the coastal town again. Ice cream. The castle. The museum. The chips. The romance and so on and so far, out into that beautiful cliff edge and gorgeous beach. It is a bevelled diamond in your mind and so glinting. You go to plan a trip, pull out the sticky map and then…
You think about all of the headlines you saw. The news you didn’t want to listen to. The land cracked on the edge and the sea swallowed most of the shoreline. Finally eaten by the mouth of the ocean. You breathe and shudder. Because most of it is not there anymore.
Louis Glazzard is a poet and novelist, currently based in Manchester. His poetry has been published by the BBC, Pan Macmillan and more. He has been a writer in residence for Geelong Libraries in Melbourne and is also the founder of Coffee and Poems club in Manchester. In prose, he is writing literary climate fiction and his prose in progress has been shortlisted and long listed for awards including the Book Edits Prize, Quiet Man Dave Prize and more.
Call to action:
Working-class coastal communities will likely be disproportionately impacted by coastal erosion and climate change. Round Our Way is campaigning for, and telling the stories of working class communities in the UK: https://www.roundourway.org/