Bed Forms

(This post is part of a series exploring the synaesthesia of written word and music. Please press play before reading. If you're on a phone, select 'listen in browser' first.)

There is the pause between tides. When the sea has pulled all the way out, tightened its fist and withdrawn, the pools remain.

On winter days the wind is a mighty companion. Bellowing at us on our supposedly meditative walks, blistering our exposed cheekbones and sun-tipped noses. That’s when the pools are deeper.

The beach is harder to walk on because of the rippled troughs of sand, echoing the ripples of water. The troughs and peaks create their own tributaries across the beach, all the way to the sea. Streams that matter only for a few hours - then, gone.

They’re called bedforms.

As I walk, I think about your deep impressions left on the mattress, the trough you spent most of your sleep. I think of the way the springs never fully adjusted, whether through the time of sustained pressure or through their own expression of mourning. I had to throw away the mattress so I no longer slept in your shadows.

All our lives, we fight to forge our path. We find satisfication and dissatisfaction in our uniquely shaped and well constructed defences. We build our network of carefully dug pathways with neat hedgerows of independence.

But when the dusk comes, the sea is calling.

It might be in a blaze of sunset glory, in the might of a winter violence. It might be a quiet trickling away, a sigh and letting go. We all return to the sea, one way or another.

Whatever form we’ve left will echo for a little while, and by morning light, the sand will be swept anew, like yesterday never happened.

Ready to be shaped again.