by Kat Meads
It’s not house arrest. You (you, specifically) haven’t done anything to merit legal restraint. But for the sake of health and safety—yours and others—you stay at home, wait.
Eventually it occurs to you that staring at a computer screen filled with images of moving water might serve as an anxiety antidote. As someone who grew up in coastal Carolina, you consider the Atlantic your home body of water, your origin water. Even the presence of its vaster cousin, the Pacific, a mere twenty miles to the west, has done nothing to alter the Atlantic’s primacy in your personal hierarchy, and so you gravitate to surf cams focused on the Atlantic versus the Pacific, on Outer Banks surf cams as opposed to Santa Cruz surf cams.
Your two favorite Outer Banks surf cams show views from Jeanettes (no apostrophe) Pier in Nags Head and views of the pier and beach in Avon from a nearby restaurant. The Avon beach, farther south, is wider. There are more sea oats on the ridge to bend in wind. Both beaches are beaches you have walked on, sat on. You recognize the light. You recognize the particular color of the Atlantic off these shorelines. You wouldn’t have described the color of blue as “angry” when you were a child, but now you do. Angry blue.
Wave rhythm is breathing rhythm. You just need to mimic the waves’ movement, water coming in, flowing out. You just need to stick with the mimicking long enough to give in to the distraction of rhythmic waves.
After a few months, you get better at the giving in. Better at the watching, better at syncing breath to waves. The more automatic the response, the more your mind can ignore the process, drift at will, supplant now with then.
Once upon a time you made sandcastles from an iteration of the sand on your screen. Once upon a time you and your father walked to the end of Jeanettes Pier, a wooden pier then, slightly bowed, the two of you passing fishermen and fisherwomen with their buckets of bait and fish, fishing lines spiraling. Under your feet, your father’s feet, the pier swayed from the force of the water, moving sideways as you and he headed farther out above open ocean. When the two of you reached the railing at the end of the pier, your father looked toward the horizon, but you, you looked down. A rickety pier, a bit of air—nothing else separated the two of you from the churning, battering water below. Frightened, you grabbed your father’s hand, held your breath.
The onscreen ocean is calm, waves barely a ripple. The gulls stand placid in minimal surf. Bright sunlight has tempered the angry blue.
You are the one who chose to watch water for solace. So why again are you holding your breath?
Kat Meads is the author of three nonfiction titles, most recently These Particular Women (2023). She lives in California. (katmeads.com)
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