Seen it all but I’ve seen nothing yet

The gate was open.

That was the first thing I noticed when we got to the campsite. The gate was unlocked, and beyond it the waters were relatively calm, rolling onto shore in quiet bursts of bubbles and spray. I felt a familiar twitch in my fingers—it was instinct. Want. I wanted to get out there.

A few weeks ago, I never would have guessed that I would find myself on the coast of Batangas, gone camping for a PE class. I never would have guessed that I would find myself anywhere.

I hadn’t been to the beach in thirteen years.

The sun beat down on my back, filtering through the palm trees, as I shook off the twitch and snapped back to attention. I had waited approximately 117,000 hours for a chance to be near the beach again. A few more wouldn’t hurt.

I had a mountain to climb. Quite literally, in fact.

It was my first attempt at such an activity, and who am I kidding? Very likely my last. I spent the entirety of it clinging onto the rocks for dear life and unleashing an entire arsenal of creative, completely unwholesome expletives I didn’t even know I’d been storing in the back of my mind.

On the way up, a boy from my group took it upon himself to help me find my footing. I’d never spoken to him before, never even met him. (We kept missing each other in class.) I didn’t see his face the whole time, just reached for his hand—which he kept holding out to me despite rule number one, Save yourself first—and listened as he told me, “You can do it!” over and over.

I didn’t find out until much later that he was very, very cute. And I was absolutely mortified, for obvious reasons.

I took a shower as soon as we made the (even more life-threatening) descent and got back to the campsite, ditching my muddied running shoes for flip-flops. Everyone had plunked themselves down on the grass, downing their water bottles and taking deep breaths. Did that just really happen? It wasn’t even sundown.

But my mind was already elsewhere. I dusted myself off, and despite my pained limbs and distorted sense of self, I stepped around the backpacks and sleeping bags and made my way over to the gate.

I stepped out, already feeling lighter at the thought of being able to steal some alone time, slow and careful as though any sudden movements might make the beach disappear. But it stayed right where it was, where it’s always been and will be for all time, even when I took a bigger step and felt the lightness become a rapid giddiness.

The pier stretched before me, at its end an open structure with a straw roof and some beach chairs. And beyond, only the sea and the clouds. God, I’d forgotten that, too, the vastness of it. How it feels like it just goes on forever, and how blue it is, and how clear. I looked down and saw a school of fish, gathered together in a small patch of the endlessness.

I took it all in: the lush mountains, the boats painted in outrageous colors that reminded me of classic sorbetes carts, the flags, the shacks, the houses. The specks of people dotting the surface of the water, bobbing along, the sun glinting off their skin.

My body ached. The sound of the waves felt like the constant pulsing in my ears multiplied by a thousand. I had just survived reaching unfathomable heights, pulling myself up using my own two hands. (And, okay, clutching a reasonably attractive someone else’s for support.) I felt monumental and overwhelmed, and therefore alive.

I sat on a beach chair and caught my breath. It had been so long and I had been so young the last time that it felt like a first, somehow. My body no longer knew what saltwater felt like, or real waves, unpredictable, ones that weren’t fabricated in a giant pool.

The cell signal was strongest out there, which was funny to me. I sent a quick text to my parents to let them know I was okay. Then I made a Spotify playlist with every “sea” song off the top of my head: “Plastic Sea” by Minks, “The Sea” by Swim Deep, “Sea of Love” as covered by Cat Power, and a curveball, “Those Wild Woods” by Johnny Gallagher, because of a chorus that goes:

My feet in the sand 
Locked up by the land 
Believe I just might leave 
If I could

And to start it off, “A Beautiful Sea” from the Sing Street soundtrack.

It left me reeling, that happy-sad song whirling in my ears, the sight of an actual beautiful sea before me, with no one else around. It was cold and it smelled like the ocean.

I went down to the beach, took off my flip-flops, rolled up my leggings, and walked out to the surf. I sank my toes into the sand, felt it shift beneath me to support my weight. It was rocky and it hurt a little, but I didn’t care. I was waiting for the spray to hit. And it did, the waves came crashing, washing over my feet.

It reminds me now of Lovely, Dark and Deep by Amy McNamara, how it said the waves always seem to sound like they’re reciting Begin afresh, afresh, afresh from the Philip Larkin poem “The Trees.”

But right then my only thought was: I want the sea to swallow me whole.

That night it rained, sudden and unrelenting. It was a storm, really. The safest place for us to stay was the shack that held the showers, so we found ourselves huddled on the slightly flooded tiles, telling stories and singing silly songs. Immediately it was clear that our tents would not be habitable—luckily I had thought to chuck my stuff into the giant plastic bags I’d brought for the exact purpose of protecting them from rain—and soon our professors were ushering us into the large, fancy rest house they were staying in. When I think about it now, it makes me feel warm: dozens of students, piled on top of each other on every available surface in a way that was more cozy than claustrophobic, finally sheltered and dry. Someone brought out a guitar and started another singalong, others were playing card games and maybe truth or dare. 

I was on the floor next to Andrea. She had noticed my wrists at dinner, and I had gone still. We’d met a couple of years before taking an Art Studies class and had even gone to a spoken word show together for a group project, and by a stroke of fate we were groupmates again for this class. But still—we barely knew each other, and I didn’t know how to respond to having her know me like this. Vulnerable, raw. 

But then she said, “It’s okay. Me, too.”

And that was a lot. It was so important to be seen and understood like that, when I didn’t even have a diagnosis and when it felt like I was being gaslit into thinking I was just making everything up, that there was nothing wrong with me. 

We talked the whole night. 

I don’t think Andrea and I have spoken since the class ended, which is a shame. But I’ll always be grateful to her for sharing her own stories with me and for helping me make sense of myself when nothing else ever did. 

The next day the skies were clear and pristine, like the night before hadn’t even happened. I was glad, because the water activities were the last thing on our schedule before we had to go home to the city.

It was surprisingly easy for me to fall back into old habits, like collecting shells and sitting at the very edge of the shore, crushing sand with my fists and letting the waves wash over my legs.

I had been planning to do my own thing, but my camping buddies convinced me to go on a banana boat ride with them. That thing was surprisingly fast—just enough to be a rush, thrilling, so you’d be on the edge of fearing for your life. The wind was in my face. I’d never been that far out in the water before.

We decided we wanted to flip the boat over at the end. The driver made the turn and gave us the signal. I let go at the very last second, before everything went upside-down.

We all went underwater. In those few seconds of complete suspension before my life vest propelled me back to the surface, I thought about Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho, that last line about how jumping into the ocean hurt, but also felt good.

Soon enough we were saying goodbye—some of us for good. I pretended I wasn’t standing around waiting to talk to the boy who had helped me, but in the back of my mind, I knew. I mean, if he was always going out of his way to say hello and check up on me, even at the gas station on the drive back, or on the banana boat where he sat in front of me and we made nice perfectly pleasant small talk, the least I could do was say goodbye.

I can see it on a dumb souvenir shirt: I climbed a mountain and all I got was this lousy schoolgirl crush. 

We fist-bumped. I said it was nice to meet him, because I wanted to be as obvious as humanly possible. He said my name. He’s always saying my name. I don’t know how he knows my name, I never told him. And just like that, we’d all gone our separate ways.

Years from now I’ll say we shared a life-or-death experience, and then we never saw each other again. But at the time I hoped I was wrong about the second part.

Looking back it feels surreal. I was miles from home with only near-strangers for company, and I had to pretend I wasn’t in the middle of my worst depressive period yet. The physical and social exertion was draining.

But I learned so much, about mountains, about the ocean, and about myself. I learned that human beings can be nice, more decent than I give them credit for most days. And if people I just met can show me kindness, then maybe I can afford to be a little kinder to myself as well.

On the beach I walked out, all the way into the water, and didn’t stop until it reached up to my chin. I looked ahead at the horizon, tried to make out anything, the farthest my eyes could see. It was all sky, and water, and light. I floated on my back, closed my eyes, the glare of the sun dazzling even through my eyelids. I tasted the salt and kept my palms up.

The waves came. They carried me, threatened to pull me under and anchored me at the same time. I was lighter than air.

The sea was finally swallowing me whole.