Arrival

A counterpart to Leaving.

The west coast is wild where I am not. Too used to the unwavering waters of boat-laden rivers and the comfort of slipping into silk, the unsheltered, blown out ebbs and flows feel shocking and rough. I stand at the water’s edge one morning, my feet unsteady on the rocks, looking down at the small but thrashing waves and I ask myself: do I want to do this? I walk across to the steps, submerged with frothing, white caps, and dunk my body under whilst holding onto the rail before returning to the wall.

This is the newness and discomfort that I had been craving, after all.

You learn to live by the tides here. High, low; spring, neap. In isolation these words have slippery, ephemeral, untethered meanings. But when faced with the push and pull of the water, they become an anchor, a life raft, a lighthouse. Days are earmarked by when to swim and where. The weather plays its part, too, conversations inevitably leading to the lack of summer so far; but I’ve been seeking out the sun at every opportunity, lying on empty pebble beaches at low tide on midweek afternoons, my skin getting darker whilst my heart gets lighter.

My mind turns to him or the absence of him and the frustration of a decade’s worth of empty feelings, and I realise I need the wildness more than I need the comfort of what I know, because there are certain things that must be shaken out of me.

I realise I hadn’t cried for three months. Not at the complexities of life or the interior knots that used to tie themselves deep in the pit of my stomach. Was I just happy, or had I simply become a little numb? I reason with myself: probably both.

And so it came not like a tidal wave but like the soft Cornish mizzle that was coating the air around me sat in the Penzance Sainsbury’s carpark. I walked in empty and came back with a packet of linguine, four bananas and a thin sleeve of chocolate flecked with sea salt and drove home feeling the edge of relief.

The morning routine has solidified more than in the city. Wake up, open the back door, look out to sea, put on a podcast, toast the rye bread, chop chives into the eggs or smooth avocado into a bowl; eat outside, whisk the matcha, two ice cubes at the bottom of the cup, watch the white milk swirl through green satin.

There’s a lot of socialising but somehow it feels slower. Nights are quiet but gloriously so. I drive out to catch sunset at old haunts and forget to be sad about being alone, and I return home listening to music at the volume my car has chosen for me (medium, nothing higher, nothing lower) and I wonder if it’s the universe’s way of showing me to trust and stop manipulating life. I see an old friend in a place I never used to go and we smoke cigarettes and drink pints overlooking the harbour and talk about whether ‘the universe’ is just another way of saying ‘god’ and what that actually means. I revel in his kindness and it feels good to laugh with someone who used to know me and is learning about this version of me, too.

Cooking takes a back seat, but I’ve also not eaten dinner out of the house. No chickens have been roasted because I’m saving it for friends instead of just myself, turning an old habit into new rituals: a sign of coming together. The smell of Cornish new potatoes poaching in hot oil, the salt rising up, the way it sits in a bowl of gold and is flipped and finished and sits high on the chopping board. I slice up a quarter and put it on a plate, carefully wrapping it with clingfilm and it journeys with me to Porthleven, where it’s given to that old friend on a narrow street after the sun has set. He tells me he ate it on the drive home and I remember that things can taste just as good on the go.

One Saturday I’m eating lunch with a friend, and two others and an Irish wolfhound named Alfie join us. We all know each other from different parts and different eras and the invisible thread that ties us together, here in this place, feels like a gift. We talk about parenthood and family dynamics and dreams of living off the land and I say how Penzance feels like a pirate town, the roughness and rawness its charm.

It seems strange to leave the safety of a place where you never have to arrive: people and situations and life happens to you because you feel you’re at the centre of the world. But I was yearning for the risk and unknown and discomfort that only a place at the edge of the land can bring you. I left with an idea of what life was down here, and I arrived learning it’s never what you think it is.

Once you get out of the city, the drive is two motorways and two never ending roads that carry you to the coast. I drive past Stonehenge, where two weeks ago I saw dark figures circling the stones on the Summer Solstice, the sky a glass of orange wine, cloudless and clear, life going in the other direction. I fly by the circle of trees that signals the return home; although I’ll soon remember it’s easy to never leave. Everything is in motion and the scenes sometimes feel slowed-down or fast-forwarded, as if I was in control of time for once, pressing skip skip skip and pause.