Salty memories of lighthouses

I don’t like fish or fishermen, but I like their company from afar. I have to admit I don’t see what’s relaxing about fishing, but it relaxes me to watch them busy about their hobby, diligently becoming smelly and salty, enjoying the pretension that they are catching their own food, hunting for their keep, or perhaps just escaping their families. They form part of the scenery, the backdrop in my mind. Their fishing rods merge with the birds and boats. Two kayakers soldier on out into the wind and swell, two white specs disappearing into the grey horizon before me. If I stand here long enough I’m sure I’ll acquire the weather-beaten, rustic look of an old fisherman’s bucket, spotted with fish scales and blood.

It’s the salt air that reminds me how once, sitting on an ocean rock wall on a dark and starless night, I told someone I felt like a lighthouse. That I was a distant flickering light that no one ever really approaches, built on a rocky outcrop, standing strong alone in the cold, crazy world, but not altogether sad. It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that perhaps this was information I shouldn’t share, a secret that contained something so vital to my fragile inner existence that when I butchered it, I was left with nothing. Except for the seaweedy taste in my mouth that you get when you give away too much of yourself to someone who doesn’t really want it anyway.

My headphones are like earmuffs but even still, they don’t block out the whistling of the wind in the yacht masts or the rumble of planes overhead. Today I feel neither sad or happy, not exceptionally high or particularly low, I just am. I stand stoically on my rocky outcrop, a quiet lighthouse, seagull crowning my shoulder, salt encrusting my face. A face blanker than Mona’s with a gentle lost look which only the feral rock wall cats notice hiding in its eyes. Tiny birds dart about me. From point to point the coast stretches out either side of me and I can just make out the distant two legged figures pushing on through the sands of the beach, or clinging to their knives and forks in their windowed, sprawling homes, so see-through and yet tall and guarded. Already my leg has begun to cramp up, my jeans slowly being worn away by that steady wind, how long before they are reduced to threads? How long would I have to wait on my rock before I became a statue, or as silent and unseen as a ghost? How long before my heart starts to beat in tune to the tides and the light in my eyes to flicker?

When I turn to leave, to hop across the big rocks that try to keep the waves out and the boats in, I carry with me in my hair, my eyes and my notebook the salt and the clouds, the wind and seagull cries and a tinge of regret that I can’t stand there forever, a lighthouse.