Salt Water and Sunshine

The sunshine coast of England. It’s Eastbourne’s claim to fame, along with the fact that some of “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging” was filmed there.

As a child, I thought ‘sunshine coast’ was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. Simply put, whoever named it that must have been blind. Truly. I grew up surrounded by muddy puddles in parks, dark skies and wet pavements. I always imagined my childhood as the epitome of not sunny and as if to prove it, the welcome sign on the road into town always had graffiti to cover that particular claim.

Of course, it wasn’t just the lack of sun. I also found the claim of ‘coast’ to be impossible before I understood that the coast of a country is just where it touches the sea. It could have been that I was a child. Of course, it also could have been the fact that when I read about the coast, I imagined sandy beaches and climbing on rocks. Our coastline consisted of uncomfortable pebbles, a shaky pier and a sea that was neither warm or clear.

Since the day I was brought into this world, I had lived in the same three bedroom house on a council estate in Eastbourne. I went to school within shouting distance of that house until I was sixteen and my first job was barely a bus ride away. I was convinced that Eastbourne was the smallest and most boring town in the world.

I’ve travelled since then.

I’ve been to Vegas where the desert sun burnt into my skin and Southern Italy where I passed out from heat stroke. There are beaches all over the world that were so beautiful I have them forever painted on the inside of my mind. Tropical fish have brushed against my leg and I’ve saved jelly fish from rock pools that would have killed them.

I’ve also been home.

Twenty-two years in a house made it feel like home. Twenty-two years in a house made it feel like the building was being stolen from me when my parents didn’t want it. I cried when my mum rang and told me she had found her forever home. She was fifty. I was twenty-two years old and my forever home was the only home I had ever known. Of course, I didn’t yet have enough money to buy the house from them, so it’s gone now. In a strange turn of events, my sister’s new best friend is the person that bought my house, but we didn’t know that until much later. I can’t help but be a little angry at her.

I was in France when the house sold, and before I could get home my stuff had been moved from my bedroom to a garage next to my mum’s new bungalow. There was warning, but I suppose I denied it until the house was sold.

If you’ve ever stepped away from a project only to come back to it with new eyes and realise it’s better than you thought, then you know what it felt like for me to go home.

There’s a certain type of wind that you can only feel when you’re on top of the Seven Sisters. It’s the kind of wind that kicks you out of dissociative episodes and screams in your ears. The only kind of wind in the world that threatens to throw you into the sea. I know it to be true because I’ve stood on so many cliffs and it wasn’t until I was home that I realised what every cliff in the world had been missing.

It’s not just the wind though, it’s everything. It’s the muddy puddle that somehow reflects a perfectly blue sky, because only in England does it rain for three days and then give you a perfectly sunny day before going right back to the rain.

There are beaches hiding in places that tourists will never look and there’s a lighthouse that you can reach by foot… if you run there and back while the tide is out. You better run, though. It’s that same wind again, as you race against the sea to touch the lighthouse. The wind that brings you back to yourself.

I don’t live in that town anymore, but now… especially during a pandemic. I would do anything to be home for one day. To feel the wind in my hair, to let the pebbles sneak into my shoes and most importantly of all, to risk my life all to touch a lighthouse.