#24 ‘A Girl and the Sea’

24.

‘A Girl and the Sea’

Our family routine permitted us every year to spend more than a month at the seaside. One of my uncles had a beautiful house in a small place on the Adriatic Riviera and we would have the privilege of spontaneously melting into the scenery every summer.

It happened often enough to call It a habit that I would wake up before anyone else. I would love to wander in the garden in the silence of the morning. The sun would be still mellow but already strong enough to invite the little lizards to join me on the stairs and stone pavements. It would be my time to play with them while the rest of the family was still asleep. They would be so friendly to me and come into the palm of my hands so I could pet them on their head. They would close their eyes and seemingly smile. That connection and fascination with little lizards that started when I was two years old never left. I was known in the family as a lizard whisperer.

Those periods spent near the sea were not vacations but a state of the mind. 

The state of mind when you get to play with the fish bladder while the fish is being cleaned and a couple of cats are waiting for the rest of the guts. Mother would be soaked in olive oil from top to toe believing it is especially good for one's hair and gives you the most beautiful bronzed colour. I personally prefered Coppertone for its smell which in combination with the smell of the salt and sun would be preserved on my beach towel that was not allowed to be washed until a long time after coming back home. Running around naked would be the most normal state of the skin. The weather forecast didn’t exist. All there was, was unthreatened stability that was to stay until we would extract ourselves from it to head home.

Days were spent in a state of repetitive routine. We would walk for what seemed to me hours in the early morning to the hidden little laguna of which you had to know of otherwise you couldn’t see it from the road. We had to climb down the cliff to reach the most pretty little bay, big enough for three people to disappear and spend the whole day feeling like the first man, woman and child on earth. 

Butter and salt would melt into the fresh white bread packed at home and left in the sun together with the fruit, particularly grapes. That would be the most decadent lunch, warming up your soul after spending the whole morning in the crisp depths of the water. Mixing the salt of the buttery bread and the hot aromatic grapes… After that, the chirping of the crickets would lead you to the gate of dreams. Sleep would start falling on your eyes and you would dissolve into the depths of the heat. The skin would not define anymore where you begin and end. You would be one with the air rich in salt and warm humidity. The crickets would endlessly chirp at that gate producing an enchanting glow to the sounds around you and you would levitate in the otherwise impossible state of lucidity.

For the most part of the day, I imagined I was a dolphin and would try to convince everyone I could breathe under the water or at least hold my breath for an unusually long time. Also, as I was mastering Swan Lake on the shore, here my ambition was the underwater pirouettes of Esther Williams from the movie Bathing Beauty. It was one of my biggest adventures to look inside the underwater caves until another movie, ‘Jaws’ brought some mixed feelings into all of us about swimming in deep waters. In the rare moments onshore, my father would love to check my lungs by taping on them and would be admiring how big and healthy they were. Living with only one lung, for him it was one of the most important things and it made me feel very special to be able to make him proud in that way. It made me inspired to hold my breath even longer.

Upon arrival at every beach for the first time, our habit was finding an orange stone, a brick that lost its home somehow and by pure chance wondered the sea, assimilating the shape and becoming one of the pebbles. We would use it to write and draw on the beautiful white oval stones the beach was covered with. That's how I learned to write letters and count…

It was the time when, otherwise very urban the whole year long, summers would turn us into real cave people stripped of the unnecessary protective gear of everyday life.

There was of course an end to that fairytale. 

Just like the house doesn't belong to our family anymore and had to be sold during the conflict in the 90's, so the coast and the sea don't belong to our country. More than a decade passed in which for various reasons it wasn’t possible to feel welcome or comfortable anymore. I found my way back as a tourist holding a passport that doesn't betray my place of birth at the first sight. I soften my tongue while I pronounce the same words in a language that once was considered one, and hope for the best. And the best it is.

Meanwhile, I wandered other seas and oceans and they only left me with the feeling of sadness and missing the main ingredient that I couldn’t explain and longed for. I still can’t. It has to do with the smell and the sound of the warmth. The portal where my existence proves to be real. The exact combination of the heat and the breeze where all the elements make me feel comfortable to create an equilibrium. Where all the rest of me peels off and I become united with the source of life. The sun, the colour blue and the hot pebbles on which the first words of my carefree childhood are written.