Ocean Water

A story that came from the death of my mother... I don't really live by an ocean, but I'd love to feel free from the weight of her death for just a moment.

 

            I went to the ocean to clear my mind and her closet. She didn't need these things anymore. I didn't have room for them, even though every object reminded me of her. The smell of her perfume that she insisted on wearing everyday of her life still lingered among the clothes. I brought the bottle that contained the dreaded stuff, as well. I remembered at that moment her delicate hands scooping it up from the dresser, and her face smiling proudly as the heavy smell fell upon her like a dense fog. I would laugh at the disappointment that fell over her face as I cringed at the wafting stench. The rushing of the waves broke my daze. I bent down and picked up her favorite blouse from the pile, and pressed it to my face, letting the once-horrid-now-wonderful smell fill my nostrils.

            I sat there on the beach, two crates full of items from her closet resting on either side of me. I looked upon the countless things that would never again be used. I told myself that it was such a waste, she would have never approved, she would have given instead of taken away. She was taken away. Now her belongings fell into my hands, and the attachment to the things she adored, touched, looked upon, or even contaminated with an overpowering stench, grew stronger yet within me.

            As I leaned back on the moist sand, staring at the horizon above the outreaching ocean, I glanced around and realized I was alone. A deep breath, and the words, "I'm alone," escaped my lips. An unwelcome revelation to my sensitive mental state, the ocean waters found their way through my eyes and down my once-rosy-now-pale cheeks. And there I sat for hours, contemplating, remembering, laughing and mourning all at once. I soon found myself rummaging through the crates, picking up the items one by one and looking them over meticulously. I could picture her pacing through the house in the shoes, snipping away with the scissors, and strutting around in her array of colorful dresses. I set each object out to sea, and watched it sail through the brisk waters and into the horizon. As each possession floated away with the current, a bit of my sorrow set off with it, as if I were picking complicated locks one by one that held cold, unsympathetic chains tightly around me.

            When the crates finally sat empty, I inhaled a deep breath for the first time in days. She had watched me do it, and she was proud. The sun was sinking slowly below the ocean waves now, swallowing all I had sent out into its great, fiery core. I stacked the empty crates and carried them back to the house, clutching tightly in my hand a perfume bottle filled to the brim with beautifully malodorous ocean water.

Reviews

[Kara Hadley]

i liked this story a lot.
you really expressed the feeling of loss well. and i really liked the line "letting the once-horrid-now-wonderful smell fill my nostrils." its funny how our feelings about things change.
well done.

[Steven Szepietowski]

I'm a big fan of hyphens, i use them far too much. I like the mysteriousness that you create and keep up with all the way up until the end. But there is also a strange modernish sense of detachment too. I know there is supposed to be a sentimentality about tossing these objects out, but because we don't really get enough emotion of backstory, we're really limited in our engagment of the piece as a whole.

Here's my socratic paragraph. What does the ocean look like? What about the beach? are there people around? What time of day is it, and are these things going to wash away because of the tide, or are they going to come back onto the beach instead of out to sea? Why throw them into the ocean? Why is this person doing the opposite of what the deceased would have done, and why is that significant? Why would she be proud? Why is this process fulfilling to the narrator? and what is the dreaded stuff in the bottle?

We tend to see too little of the snippets that reflect on the relationship between these two people, and without that, the emotionality of the piece suffers a bit.

"Instead, she would have given them away." No need to add instead of taking away. Especially since the sentence that follows is "She was taken away."

Just some things to think about.