They say that when you put your ear next to a seashell, you can hear the ocean. That you can hear the waves crashing on the sand, the ripples on the sea’s face lapping against each other like neighbors, the cawing of seagulls as they fly in search of prey.
Hayden had always wondered if the opposite was true. If maybe, the ocean could hear him too.
He left his sandals by the large boulder that jutted from the sand. That rock stood out on the beach, like the shore’s middle finger to the water that tried to drown it constantly. During high tides, the ocean would go a foot and a half up the boulder’s face. Through time, moss and algae populated that foot and a half of damp rock. It made the boulder harder to climb, but he did it anyway.
Barefoot above the boulder, Hayden peered into the ocean, like he always did. Today was not so different from most other days.
It was late October. The exact date, Hayden wasn’t quite sure. He hasn’t kept proper track of time since he got home. The sun rose and the sun set and over again. All he cared about was waking up, but even that he wasn’t much invested in.
The saturated air of dawn calmed Hayden. It was one of the few things left in the world that could do that. He breathed deeply, letting the calm spread from his lungs to his limbs. For a moment, his fingertips tingled. He could stay like that for a while. For a moment. Maybe even forever.
But the calm exited his body as the air did.
Atop the boulder perched a plain beige seashell. He crouched and picked it up. The shell was light and fit neatly on his palm. He wanted to ask it how it got to the top of the boulder. That why, of all places, would it want to end up there. Did it mean to?
But he knew seashells couldn’t answer him and his questions. They didn’t have voices to. Instead, he placed the shell against his ear and listened.
The muffled reverberations of the waves echoed inside. The sounds of water crashing and lapping from a distance, like an old relative calling you back home before it got too dark.
Hayden closed his eyes.
Every time Hayden thought of his childhood, it was always painted in a hazy orange hue, as if the world was always entrenched in a sunset that never ended. He found himself in the center of a street, his hand on the middle line crevice that separated the left side of the road from the right. Dirt and sand got into his fingernails.
He recognized the place, the street of his old home. It was the place he usually was whenever Hayden dreams or remembers most anything, maybe because it was the only other place, apart from this beach, that felt like home.
He knew the street more than he knew himself; cars parked on both sides of the road, trees jutting from cracks on the skimpy sidewalks, adults sitting down and smoking on makeshift wooden benches, and kids running around chasing each other while snot trickled down their noses.
Hayden used to be one of those kids. He looked down to his palms, now smaller, smoother, and more fragile. He was a kid again.
He wanted to jump and feel the air course through his young hair. He wanted to run and be untiring again, as he would never be.
He ran. His feet bounded, one step to another. He felt like he was leaping on clouds. The houses that stood beside the street blurred. His speed was too much for light and his vision follow. His body felt as light as the breeze, as he zipped through corners and alleyways. All the while, the sun glistened in the sky.
He ran until he no longer knew where he was. His heart sank when he realized that he was far from his home.
“Where am I?” he asked aloud. He had a tendency to forget things, which was why Hayden loved the process of remembering. It was like regaining aspects of his life he had momentarily lost.
But then the street rumbled begrudgingly, and the orange hues turned gray. Then the sky started falling.
Hayden jolted his eyes open. He was back atop the boulder, shell in hand. He laid it where he found it, and he jumped down to the sand.
That’s never happened before, he thought, trying to shake his shock off. It felt scary when the clouds rushed to the ground, and the world started to tighten. In the few seconds before he opened his eyes, Hayden remembered, the air squeezed his lungs. And he smelled… smoke and ash?
He took a deep breath to regain some of his composure, before strolling down the shore. The sea water came crawling softly to douse his feet wet. With each step, Hayden left foot-shaped marks on the sand.
Ahead, a small empty shell stapled itself on a chink in the sand. It was beautiful, pointed, and decorated with soft shades of pink and yellow. Hayden picked it up and observed it. This seashell was heavier than the last one.
He placed it beside his ear.
He heard nothing, but he felt something inside the shell move. Suddenly, Hayden felt something brush against his earlobe, and he felt every single part of his body, from his ear to the small hairs that stuck out of his small toe, straighten and tingle. He threw the shell back into the sand.
Whatever creature was inside the shell skittered away from Hayden, never to be seen or heard from again. He patted his ear to check whether it was still in decent shape or not. Luckily, no harm was done.
Hayden continued to walk. His dad used to take him on walks here on this very beach when he was a little kid. They used to talk about a lot of things, like the things they both loved (almost all kinds of cheese), and the things they both hated (blue cheese). Hayden would talk about school, and how easy he thought it was. His dad wouldn’t talk about his work much, Hayden felt like it was a sensitive topic for him. They used to talk about their dreams, and how Hayden’s dad used to dream of becoming a renowned architect.
Hayden forgot what he wanted to be when he was a kid. He had a tendency to forget things. He wondered if he always dreamed to be happy as he did now. Was he ever happy? Yes, I was, he remembered.
Together, Hayden and his dad would pick seashells up from the shore and listen to the music of the sea. They would use the shells as sort of telephone receivers, and they’d pretend to talk to each other through the shells, as if the shells were connected by some sort of line. Those were the moments no one could ever take away from him, the moments Hayden would never forget.
When his dad died, no one took Hayden to the beach anymore. No one else but himself.
A few feet in front of Hayden, a seashell sat timidly beneath the lapping waves. As he drew closer, he noticed that shards of old glass surrounded the shell, as if they were brought onto the shore together. After the prior incident with the previous shell, a nagging hesitation beckoned Hayden not to pick the shell up.
But he grabbed it anyway, careful as to not graze the glass.
The shell was pale and undistinctive, apart from the smudges of black and gray that was smeared across its rounded surface. He shook the shell to make sure that nothing lived in it. Thankfully, nothing inside moved.
He placed the shell next to his ear. “Hi,” he said wistfully. He wondered again if the ocean listened to him as he listened to it. If the ocean remembered the conversations he and his father had between the shells. If the ocean cared.
An unfamiliar voice came from the shell in reply, “Hello.” It was the voice of a girl, a girl he has never met before. Or maybe he has, Hayden could never be quite sure. He tends to forget things.
“Hello?”
Comments