The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘You can’t,’ said Lettie. ‘It would destroy you.’
I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, ‘Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an “I”. No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points …’

Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.

I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.

And it wasn’t the sea. It was the ocean.
Lettie Hempstock’s ocean.
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

On my left the younger woman said, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.”

to Play.”
. . . the moon doth shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your meat,
and join your playfellows in the street.
Come with a whoop and come with a call.
Come with a whole heart or not at all . . .
I

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. “Yum!” he’d say, and “Charcoal! Good for you!” and “Burnt toast! My favorite!” and he’d eat it all up. When I was much older he confessed to me that he had not ever liked burnt toast, had only eaten it to prevent it from going to waste, and, for a fraction of a moment, my entire childhood felt like a lie: it was as if one of the pillars of belief that my world had been built upon had crumbled into dry sand.

“That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long

You could stand a spoon straight up in it, as my father always said of a cup of tea of which he approved.