March to the sand gods.

The sand gods don’t care whether or not they exist, they will punish you anyways.

They are god, and god is not understandable to us mortal humans.

You can cry and you can scream for mercy and you can ignore their existence, you can believe them false or you can devote to them your love and loyalty and spend your whole miserable life searching to prove their existence, but it is all of very little consequence to the sand gods.

When the dog runs off and gets goat’s head thorns stuck in the pads of its feet, and when a dead seal beaches on the coast and lies rotting and stinking a mile in both directions for a week, and when the milk carton is dropped too hard and springs a leak in the grocery bag and later empties out in the fridge, then the sand gods are angry and you feel their displeasure.

The only constant to the sand gods is this, that their presence fades exponentially with your distance from the sea, that is why they are called sand gods.

For instance, in Chicago, Mrs. Plumber opens the fridge door to find the milk carton’s sprung a leak and there’s spoiled milk dripping off the shelves and pooling on her good socks, and immediately blames the mess on her teenage daughter Martha who brought in the groceries Tuesday morning. Martha accuses her younger brother Billy of fiddling with the groceries after she left them safely on the kitchen counter, who points to the dog, and boisterous golden retriever of two, as the culprit for having dared to retrieve her tennis ball from a place so forbidden as the kitchen counter, and so it goes on.

In Pacific city, we would’ve blamed the sand gods and gotten on with our lives.

I can hear my grandmother's dismal sigh now, ringing out her washcloth in the sink as she mutters something under her breath, eyes lifted to somewhere slightly below the heavens and facing west, then she’d call me from where I was arranging dried macaroni into curious shaped on the kitchen counter.

“Mary Beth! I need you to do a job for me.”

“Why do I hafta grandmother?”

“Because.” she’d reply. “I’m making breakfast.”

“But grandmother….”

I’d press my palms into the kitchen table whining as I attempted to make the same case I’d made a dozen times previously,

“It’s not my fault the milk spilled….”

“It’s no one’s fault.”

She’d cut me off mid excuse. Always.

“It’s the sand gods what’ve done it, they’re angry today.”

She’d draw up her shoulders, sighing in a forlornly resigned way,

“And now I need to make breakfast and I need you to mop up the mess in the fridge, so hurry up and be a good girl now.”

And I would, whatever that means. I’d scowl and put a piece of dried macaroni in my mouth to chew on, then slip down from the kitchen chair and run to the fridge in my socked feet to take the washcloth from my grandmother.

Come to think of it, she never said the sand gods were angry with me. They never accused me of doing something they didn’t like or brought down their wrath upon me specifically in a righteous sort of way. Not like the God you pray to in church who they tell you has such a personal investment in yourself in particular. Grandmother said it didn’t matter what you did.

“You can’t escape the sand gods Mary Beth.”

She’d tell me, rocking in the dusk on the old rocking chair my grandfather had built for her out on the back porch, facing towards the sea.

I was quiet then. I wanted to hear her speak.

“Their judgement will reach you, for they are a part of all things. They are a part of the living….they are a part of the dead….”

Here her eyes got misty and far away. I looked to see where she was looking, but her eyes went somewhere I could not follow.

The way her words sounded was wise, but I could not see the wisdom in such words. Finally I spoke up,

“I do not understand grandmother, if the sand gods are….if they are here, by the sea, then why do we not just move inland?”

My grandmother looked confused, for a brief moment I swear to it that I saw confusion pass her face.

“Leave the sea?”

She sounded almost childlike. Her eyes were blue like a little girl’s, and there was confusion in her voice. Then her face re-formed, like clouds shifting together to cover the sun, and her eyes got grey again.

“No child, we can never leave the sea.” she laughed harshly, without any humor, like a croaking seagull drifting over the choppy ocean.

“Ignore me my child….ignore me. For I am old and my ramblings are those of an old lady who does not know what she is saying.”

But then I listened all the more. Children rarely listen to the things that they’re supposed to. The lessons adults give to them, wrapped in pretty string with easy-to-swallow wrapping paper. Life lessons which are meaningless without a life, like enjoy your youth, and go to bed early, and your parents love you. It’s when an adult knows they're not supposed to be saying things, that a child knows they need to listen.

When I was of sixteen years of age, I tried to pray to the sand gods.

I had just lost my mother, who would visit occasionally after she left my father and sent me to live with his mother.

They told me she was high when she crashed the car. They told me that happened a lot. She didn’t have life insurance because no one could insure something like that profitably, but no one told me that.

All the stuff of value she had in the world went to my father who swooped in like a vulture and greeted me sympathetically at the funeral. He got in a yelling fight with my grandmother, and left early the next morning.

I wished I had something not-of-value with sentimental attachment from my mother, but the only thing she was sentimentally attached to was money and the finite feelings she could buy with it. As a result, I found myself with precious little memories in either direction.

I wandered into my room wishing I was in my mother’s house so I could wander into her’s, and stared at an old family photograph in the bottom of my sock drawer wondering if he had loved her then.

If people could put on faces and ruin my memories, make them unstable and untrustworthy, like rotten wood being eaten up from the inside by termites……..and that was when I began to be afraid, because if time is has been and the past is dead, then who are the living termites in my memories?

And that is when I began to pray.

I prayed for their shapeless forms to take shape and I prayed for their bodies, empty and insectoid, to vomit just a little of my life back up into the holes which they had carved in the wood. My grandmother found me sobbing on the floor. She heard the names I was crying, and touched me gently on the shoulder.

“No dear, that’s not how it works.”

I looked up and my eyes were red and puffy. Hers were bluish. She nodded towards the door and I followed her.

We walked, silently out into the morning, brushing past the coarse bushes of sea-grass like sandy wolf fur, whipped by the wind. The sand was cold and soft against my bare feet, and the air smelled pleasantly of long dead fish. She kept walking towards the sea, and I followed her.

When we stopped, it was ankle deep in clear water, burning cold, and lumps of yellowed sea foam collected around my legs. My grandmother turned to face me and took my hands in her own rough and withered ones.

“Now, do you see it?”

She breathed. Her thumbs were rubbing the sides of my hands, and the water was burning my feet. I lifted them up one by one and shook them out, breathing in not-to-deeply the familiar sea air.

“They are here.”

she tilted her head back and looked up to the sky.

“They are all around us…..every step, every move, every choice we,” She shook her head as if to clear it. “We THOUGHT we made….”

She looked me dead in her blue eyes,

“Do you understand? You are of the sand gods my darling, we all are.”

And I did understand. My mother was dead, and my grandmother was speaking in rhymes to the sky.

I looked her deep in her blue eyes and took her old soft hand.

“Yes grandmother, I understand.”

She nodded, and she looked lost when she did. I led her back up to the house gently.

In the month after the death of my mother, I made calls, and found my father who agreed that I should come live with him. We put my grandmother in an adult care facility where it became more and more evident that she was losing her mind.

She blamed it on the sea.

I do have more to thank her for though, other than being my mother for sixteen years, and the only parent I ever knew. She introduced me to Liliana. I’d never had a proper friend before.

Something about living in a cabin with the crazy old woman by the sea, and coming to school each day with seaweed and shells which my grandmother did not scold me for wearing on my person, did not sit right with the other children at school. And when we were young and ran barefoot on the beach during the summers, they accused me of being a sea witch, because I swam like a fish in my clothes and did not bother to dry off afterwards, meaning my hair was always long and dark and sticky like kelp.

It was one of the days where I was visiting her in the care home, and looking uncomfortably round at the white walls that smelled of sanitation as I sat in the waiting room, meant to look like the lobby of a real house. Only real houses don’t have lobbies.

There were glossy magazines one the coffee table and vase of fake flowers with real water and glass pebbles at the bottom.

“Come in?”

I looked up, and the nice woman with the nervous smile peering around the door was asking me a statement.

I’d been there plenty of times already like everyone does when they feel guilty. I knew which room was my grandmother’s, and I made my way there with very little help from the nervous aid, twittering things that were oddly conversational. By that I mean they would’ve made for an odd conversation had I responded with more than a nod and a polite smile.

I reached the fifth room with some amount of relief, and found there was someone in there already with my grandmother.

She cut herself off mid laugh and turned around to smile at me in that vaguely welcoming way that people do when they’ve just been discussing something amusing about you and didn’t expect your arrival for another hour.

“Hello! Mary...Beth Is it? Your grandmother’s lovely!”

her hand was extended and her arm was just as perfect as the rest of her.

She was wearing a yellow sundress and she had green eyes. I can’t for the life of me remember what color her hair was at any point during the time I knew her.

“Yes.” I replied stiffly.

It’s hard not to be stiff with someone who might as well be your grandmother’s new granddaughter.

She was smiling in the back, her grey eyes glittering.

“I’m Lily.''

She never dropped her smile and I never once called her Liliana, but I refer to her by that now because that was her full name and I do not want to forget it.

We became best friends eventually.

I didn’t like her at first, but girls usually don’t. It’s funny, in my experience, that the people that stick around aren't the ones you have an initial burst of sunshine towards. They aren’t the ones that make you feel happy.

I made her leave.

Two Sundays after that, we spent the day driving around the city looking for her dog. Afterwards we went back to her house despite my protesting extensively in that polite way that's similar to getting your parent to say you’re not allowed somewhere, and we had frozen pizza for dinner and comforted her dog.

I still didn’t like her.

She made me watch a dumb zombie movie with her, that her mom had rented on her amazon account accidentally last week and was coincidentally still good for another day.

We both agreed it was a dumb movie, even though I remember her getting emotional in parts, which I would later learn was just the way she was, (she once stopped the car in a forty-mile-an-hour speed zone to get out and move a fat banana slug to the side of the road.) But it was the first time we’d agreed on something, which caught me off guard.

After that she insisted I spend the night, because it was late, (it was eleven o'clock) and I was already here, (I lived seven miles away) and she didn’t like to drive after dark (this may’ve been true).

Her parents weren’t home and my father couldn’t care less where I spent the night, so I reluctantly agreed, kicking myself for not driving my own car.

I suppose if I still lived in Pacific City, somewhere near the coast where the houses in between miles of dense stunted little pine trees were as sparse as the grey beach itself, I may’ve blamed this turn of events on the sand gods.

As it was, with the information with which my superstitious grandmother had infected my mind, I had ample knowledge of the limits of their power out of view of the crashing sea. The white noise, which tethered us like a form of accountability, day in and day out, mind and soul always in our thoughts to the mighty ocean. Here, it was mostly quiet, and the only sound from Lily’s parent’s cul de sac, was the far-away nightly traffic on the highway.

So I decided, cautiously, to believe in something like fate.

We didn’t sleep much, but we talked half the night.

There’s something about lying in the dark, wrapped up in a sleeping bag on the floor of a strange house that makes it easy to talk. The later at night it gets, the more things you think of, things that haven’t yet been said, which it suddenly becomes of much more evident need to be said, especially when you can’t see the other person’s face, just hear their voice floating to you from somewhere in the shadows.

I cried for the first time in three years when I told her about my mother.

I hadn’t cried since I left my grandmother’s old house by the sea, left it alone and boarded up like my grandmother herself and her peculiar mind, untrustworthy perhaps even in my memories.

But no one heard me except for her, and I didn’t feel stupid for having done so.

Lily told me later that she had a paralyzing fear of being alone in the house, which was why I had spent the night after all.

Not the sand gods, and not fate, but fear, which I think is a far more accurate representation of life in general.

It was fear that kept me with Victor for four years.

I could tell you it was fear of something specific and possibly cliche, like being alone or unlovable or just….not wanted. But in truth, I don’t remember.

I don’t remember Victor at all.

All I remember is a hole, about five years after I met Liliana, and two years after graduating college. A spacey period with large gaps, which I suppose are the times I spent with him.

The amount of gaps leads me to wonder if I did anything else at all those four years.

There seems hardly enough time to sleep in the memories that I have.

Hardly time to breathe….. And over all the memories and holes there is only one uniting thread, one thing to clutch on that I know is real and tangible and informs me I was not in a sleepwalking dream.

It’s a feeling of fear. Deep and overwhelming and depressing. It suffocates those times like smoke, so I do not like to dwell on them long.

Liliana was there in the cracks, and I’ve wondered often why she was. She told me I should leave him, and I do not know why I didn’t listen. I might have a better idea had I still access to those gaps in my memory.

Alas, I am old and all I have is unsatisfactory regret.

She was there when it ended, I was sad and I still knew why then. I don’t like to say more than sad because I can’t for the life of me recall what I was mourning.

Liliana had a paralyzing fear of being alone in general. I lived with her for awhile after leaving Victor, and then I married someone who’s name I can no longer remember.

There is a photo of his face on my bedside table, taken when he was young and smiling, and I stare very hard at it sometimes, trying to remember why I loved him.

I know that I did, because the holes in my memory where he used to be are filled with love, which I suppose they cannot take.

I walk much more slowly now, and even my bones hurt. My hair is stained with grey, like sand trying desperately to dry it’s thick bleeding inkwell of color. I don’t suppose it will ever be snow white like my grandmother’s at the end, but it won’t be soft and raven-colored like my mother’s at her end.

I am in a place like the one we put her in. It’s called Seashell Shores, and there’s sand dusting the broken asphalt in the parking lot and I can hear, if not see, the crashing waves from my shuttered window at night, because I understand now why she wanted to die near the sea.

This place took so much from her.

Eventually, it will have taken all from me too. When all the wood of my mind has been eaten up, stretching back into my memories which is the past, they will eat the future, which is everything next week and the Tuesday after that, and finally, the possibility of me being alive tomorrow.

That is not to say there will be nothing left at the end, for after termites eat a sick of wood all the way through, they are left, swarming together in crawling mass for just moment, in a distinctly stick-like shape before they disperse, taking the bits of digesting wood with them into the universe.

That is what I will be at the end, and I may thank the sand gods for that, which is the last and only thing I will ever have to thank them for.

As I wait alone at the end, there will be nothing of me left, only the love and the fear and the peace which I have experienced for one crucial moment, before that too dissipates, like mist.

I hope Liliana comes to visit tomorrow, and brings my son, I can’t remember the name which I gave him, only his beautiful face, like the one smiling at me from my bedside table.

She is older but she has longer, I suppose because she was not raised by the sea.

The sand gods are not as greedy for the things they cannot smell.

How strange that I have begun to personify them in my twilight, as if I had forgotten;

The sand gods do not care what we make of them, they will take us all in the end regardless.

It’s not fate, and it’s not fear, it’s exactly what we make of it.