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Ocean Ice Cream

A writing about getting ice cream after the beach.

By York S.Published 2 years ago 4 min read
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Summer is the ocean for me. You step outside and your skin immediately heats, the space of a breath all you get before your back is slicked with wet, humidity or sweat hard to gauge. Walking out of the house barefoot in the same careless way you like to the rest of the year results in the bottoms of your feet burning, even if you run to the safety of the grass on the tops of your feet, trying to touch the asphalt as little as possible. As a child with my mother the beach was a carefully planned excursion; chairs and cooler and bag with sunscreen, towels, and change of clothes all carefully tetris'd into the trunk, the day begun early. Older and with my father, it began groggily, irritable in the face of any prodding, parking further away and something usually forgotten at home.

Drives to the ocean in the summer must start with the windows up and the air conditioning on as to avoid unnecessary irritation with exposure to the heat, but as you get closer to the water and the air cools and begins to smell of salt, it’s imperative that one rolls the windows down. The seagulls will wheel overhead, and cheap/overpriced beachfront stores will start to appear as the wind has its way with your hair. Parking at the beach happens at variable distance depending on the time of day and how far into the season you are, but the walk across the sand is the same, feet sinking in like learning how to walk on the moon for the first few steps before your balance is restored. Hot grains of sand sneak into your shoes or spill across your sandals and burn your feet as you go, like the blue spread out before you burns your eyes when you first look at it, bright and endless with the sun reflecting off it.

I wanted to be a fish when I was a kid. Not in the way I wanted to be a veterinarian, but in the way that I could spend hours in the ocean whenever we went and never leave the water. Inevitably someone jokingly called me a little fish, and I ached for it to be true, body a ripple away from disappearing into the whitecaps. It was unknown, and far. There was something both formless and vivid to my imaginings of living within the ocean, half remembered science lessons mixed with fairytales where girls became seafoam. The ocean is the sort of ancient thing to have power, and I clung to hope of magic long after most children had given up. I could never hold my breath long enough, or swim far enough from shore, before being called back to a life on the surface though. How do you recover from a loss like that, nebulous and unexplainable?

Days at the beach with my mother ended when her attention span or sunscreen was exhausted; with my father they ended with the sunset. We sat on the shore with sand sticking to our legs and feet and watched the sky change colour over the water, though it was no longer safe for us to linger in the waves, sunrise and set when sharks are more active. It was heavier walking back across the sand and packing into the car than making the trip down to the beach, and more mundane too. The windows would still be down as we left. and as we drove away the air still smelled of the ocean, our hair crusted with salt and sand. Before the air was just air again we stopped at an ice cream shop, one that was only open during the summer and somehow that was important, that it was preserved. They served vanilla swirled together with fruit you picked out, the flavours sweeter for the salt of the ocean still coating your tongue, shrivelling your mouth. And with this first taste of something besides ocean water, you were rooted more firmly in the surface again. Even if you still felt the loss of another world, an escape, it was further away, your life settled more firmly on your shoulders again.

nature
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About the Creator

York S.

Hello, I am a troubled young person in their twenties and sometimes I write stuff.

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