A Love Letter to the English Channel
Ah my love,
This is so unexpected, you have quite literally knocked me off my feet and truly stolen my heart. I am a cat reclining on a radiator and you have turned me canine and made me bound through your waves. As a child in Birmingham, apart from the annual trip to Dorset I never saw your kind, let alone lingered in your bounty. I am a swimmer with no style and very little grace and yet, and yet, I find myself dreaming of you, stripping down to my bare essentials on a brisk October evening to be with you. No longer a towel holding, chocolate snacking spectator, I am a dedicated partner to your honest loving. I am so far removed from the woman I know and yet never more truly myself.
In the car travelling to be with you I listen to music and look for the kestrel who hovers above the litter strewn roadside, but mostly I look at the sky and wonder about your mood. Our love demands ritual and ours begins in the car park. My friend acts as my guide and support but most of all she is my friend, a woman I love, who enriches my world with intellectual colour and dirty merriment. We look at each other – as if queueing for the world’s scariest rollercoaster, trepidation fizzes, we are giddy teenagers anticipating the last dance at the school disco. As the cold wind runs through us we exchange expletives through wide smiles turning towards your wild beauty. Sometimes we are joined by others, friends, our daughters and mothers. On occasion our sons or brothers or male friends come along but it is always loving and supportive, fun and resilient, this community is female in its nature if not always in its components and you welcome us all.
Once in the water you gift us each other, we holler and hoot, faces illuminated, glowing, we shout and sing and beam with life. Beyond this joyful abundance the depth of your wisdom and great capacity for love is felt by each of us alone. Moving my alabaster limbs through the cold charge, aware of the soft warmth of guts and gubbins deep within my body whilst my cold, smooth, taunt, chilled shell calcifies. Salty tears form as I look at the sky on my Dad’s birthday, snatches of songs fill my head and my heart as I am thrilled with the knowledge that I am a tiny yet integral part of this enormous web of life. Your watery gifts are mind boggling in their abilities. Such intimately private moments experienced within our congregation. Your call to prayer is rich in complexity, tailor made for our individual spirits yet magnified by our shared experience.
At times you are agitated and tempestuous with rage. These are the days to be with you from afar. To admire your rich and complex love affairs with the ever changing demands of winds unsettling passion and the rhythmical waxing and waning of the moon forever holding you in its celestial embrace. You are not monogamous but I don’t mind, to try to make you so would be to claim a mountain or to own the sky. Some may try, such folly my love, such folly, but man is foolish and greedy by nature and seems to lack the capacity for change. You tell me so every time I visit and you have spewed more plastic detritus from your broken heart. I listen but am overwhelmed by the gargantuan task of turning the tide and I leave despondent, angry and ashamed.
On days when you are the right side of playful, we shelter by the harbour wall and you treat us to waves big enough to thrill but safe enough to enjoy. We jump and bound over your temporary hillsides and shifting landscape. On occasion you unexpectedly kiss my face and knock me off my feet, reminding me of the visceral truth of being alive. I taste your salty kisses by the fireside late at night. Tenderly you linger and whisper to my heart. Endlessly you bring me home, to these bones, to this heart, to this life.
Rosie x
