You remember being young and being by the ocean.

You walk home from the beach with a layer of salt crusted on your skin. It’s still hot under the afternoon sun, blaring down and frying all of you as you hike up the street. You feel like a potato chip.

The sea was wild that day—just wild enough to be exhilarating without tipping over into being scary. It was this deep grey-green colour, like jade, with lacy white froth on top of the waves. The swell was hungry, pulling you out and rearing up, dumping back down, shoving you towards the shore.

You were brave and put your head under, like your dad taught you. You ducked underneath a cresting wave so it wouldn’t smack you in the face and came out the other side safe and triumphant. You got water up your nose and the seawater taste lingers, even now, but you did it! You’re small against the ocean, so this is a triumph.

But you’re out of the water now, damp towel draped over your shoulders and sandy feet shoved into rubber sandals. The house where you’re staying is “a short walk” away, according to your parents, but in the baking heat it is a trek. Your skin is dry by the time you reach the cottage. Your swimmers cling clammily to you and the skin between your toes is rubbed raw from the strap of the thongs.

You are still at home in this salt-crusted, summer-scented body. In years to come, it will renovate itself in ways you do not approve of: installing curves you find ungainly, extending your legs and adding padding to your thighs, altogether following a design that you are not the architect for. You know it’s sunscreen-flavoured nostalgia, but you can’t help but long for a return to this moment. So blissfully unaware of yourself as a gendered being, just a little person with a body, a body floating weightless in the sea.

You and your siblings race each other through the dappled shade of the palm trees leaning over the driveway, and you’re home free.

At the peak of summer, there’s enough daylight left that if you hang your stuff on the clothesline now, it’ll be dry by nightfall. Mum leads a flurry of activity, herding the kids, handing out clothes-pegs, drawing up an impromptu roster for the shower and warning you all to brush the sand off your feet before you come inside so it doesn’t all go down the drain. Dad is setting up dinner, chopping vegetables and setting out trays of meat that will soon be charring on the little iron barbecue in the yard.

Your sister called dibs on the first shower so you’re left in your saltiness for a while longer. You can’t sit on the couch with your clammy swimmer-clad butt, so you float around outside, standing on the deck with bare feet calloused from rock-hopping. Birds are sing-yelling in the trees. Dad’s got the radio on in the kitchen. In the distance, if you really listen, you can hear the crush and rush of the sea.

The light is blazing golden and the shadows are getting long, but again, it’s that magic summertime space where it stays light for hours, so it feels like it could be the middle of the afternoon. It feels like there are a thousand hours left in the day. It feels like the day has been a thousand hours long. You remember feeling so free, so fresh, so frenzied, and so happy and so safe.

About the author

A.R. Henderson (they/them or she/her) is a writer, editor, and researcher working on Ngunnawal country. They completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra, where they studied LGBTQIA+ representation in young adult literature. Way back in 2012 they were a finalist in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Writer of the Year competition. Their short stories have appeared in literary magazines such as SWAMP and #EnbyLife and anthologies including An Unexpected Party (Fremantle Press, 2023). You can find all their work in a nice, neat pile at arhendersonwrites.com.

Photo by Alex Voulgaris on Unsplash.