I am ocean

Some people carry their memories like water.

Mine behave like bubbles in a pot—rising, swelling, vanishing, replaced by another and another, until my chest feels crowded and loud. On those days, I am the ocean: restless, salted, full of things I have swallowed without ever chewing.

And then there are days when the bubbles stop. On such a day, I went to Beach.

It was around six in the evening . The sky was pale, the kind of pale that makes everything look like it has got a strange personality. The sand was cold under my shoes. The sea lay spread out like a wide thought you cannot finish.

People jogged along the shoreline with headphones clamped over their ears, shutting out the ocean as if it were background noise. I watched them and felt an old irritation rise: Why come to the ocean only to refuse it’s dancing voice?

I sat on a low wall and let the wind worry my hair.

That’s when I saw her.

An older woman—maybe sixty—walking slowly with a tremor in her steps. Not the casual wobble of age, but the stubborn shaking of a body being disobeyed by itself. She wore a faded cardigan, though the day wasn’t that cold, and held her phone in her hand like it was a fragile thing she didn’t trust.

She passed me, then returned and sat on a wooden bench a little away. She began calling someone.

Again. Again.

Her voice was too quiet for the wind to carry. But I could see the pattern: lift the phone, listen, frown,worry, bite the lip and try again. Each time her shoulders sagged a little more, as if each unanswered ring took something small from her.

She stood, walked toward the car park, paused as though she might flag down a taxi from thin air, then turned back and came to the bench again.

Pride is often just fear wearing better mask. I recognised it. It looked like her trembling hand refusing to wave at strangers.

I walked up slowly, keeping my distance at first.

“Hello,” I said.

She looked up, startled—then smiled. A relieved smile. A smile that made my throat tighten unexpectedly, because it said: *Thank God, someone sees me.*

“Hello,” she said back.

“Are you… looking for something?” I asked,. Sometimes, help had to be disguised as curiosity.

“Yes.” She held up her phone. “I need to book a taxi.”

At that hour, taxis didn’t circle Brighton like sharks. I checked Uber. Twenty-five minutes.

I showed her the screen. “It’s going to take time,” I said. “If it’s not far… I can drop you.”

This was before COVID. Before we learned to scan every gesture for threat.

She studied my face the way you study a door before entering a dark room. Then she nodded.

“Alright,” she said softly.

In the car she sat very carefully, I thought sitting too quickly might topple her. She folded her hands in her lap, and the tremor made her fingers tap each other like nervous birds.

For a few minutes we drove in silence. The ocean slipped behind us. But the salt stayed in the air, in my nose, in the spaces between thoughts.

Then, without clearing her throat, without drama, she said, “I was diagnosed last month.”

I kept my eyes on the road. “With what?” I asked, though I thought I already knew.

“Parkinson’s,” she said, as if naming the day of the week.

The word filled the car. Heavy. Ordinary. Final.

“My son stayed with me for a few days,” she continued. “But he works in Brisbane. He can’t…” She let the sentence trail off, not because she didn’t know what to say, but because she didn’t want to say the whole truth.

Soon she would go to a care centre. Before that, she wanted to come to the beach “one more time,” she said. Not to do anything special. Just to be there. Just to let her body remember what it felt like to walk with the sea beside it. Just to remember the walk with her husband on her first date holding hands together dreaming a life. Just to remember building sand castles with her daughter. Just to remember the night she kissed her boyfriend under the moonlight knowing he can never be hers. Just to remember the little walk with her dog wiping tears after burying her dog that morning. Just to remember the day she came and sat there hitting her menopause. Just to remember the day she cried uncontrollably feeling anxious looking at her sagging breasts. Just to remember the day she gracefully accepted the first ray of silver hair as part of her. Just to remember her life. Just to remember her love. Just to remember her friends. Just to remember her womanhood. Just to remember her motherhood.

The more she started sharing, something cracked like a firewood inside me.

O Memories,

How sweet they are!

O Memories,

How cruel they are!

Bringing hope a moment,

Crushing soul a moment.

As she spoke, something uncomfortable rose in me—not annoyance at her, but panic in myself.

Back home, I might have reached for her hand, offered comfort, performed kindness the way we are taught. Here, my mind did what it always does when faced with another person’s grief: it tried to protect me.

*Why is she telling me this? Why me? What does she expect? What can I do?*

The thoughts were shameful. I swallowed them.

I drove. I listened.

And then she did something unexpected. She turned her head, looked out the window, and said, suddenly fierce, “Do you watch footy?”

The change startled me. It was like watching someone pull a bright scarf out of a dark cupboard.

“I… don’t really know much,” I admitted.

“That’s alright,” she said, and her voice grew animated, almost young. She began describing last night’s match—who kicked what, who failed, who surprised, how a particular player had “always had heart.” She spoke about the history of the game in Australia. She sounded like she had lived through it and it had held her life together in some quiet way. I saw the little happy girl jumping out of her. The cute innocent girl, who wanted to marry her maths teacher. The brave girl who picked a fight with her mother. The mischievous girl who hid her brother shoes under a blanket.

Her body trembled, but her words stood firm.

And I felt it then: what she was doing.

She wasn’t only telling me about footy.

She was telling herself she was still herself. Not a diagnosis. Not a future room in a facility. Not a son too far away. A person with opinions, loyalties, a favourite team, a memory of cheering, the old pleasure of being passionate about something that doesn’t kill you.

By the time we reached her place, her cheeks had red. Her eyes looked brighter, not because her life was easier, but because she had been allowed to be more than her pain for half an hour.

She got out carefully. Then she turned back.

“Do you need anything else?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

She smiled at me—smaller than the first smile, but deeper.

“Thank you for listening,” she said. “I appreciate your time and patience.”

And then she walked away, trembling slightly, but upright.

And when she left, I felt the tide inside me pull back—quietly carrying her story with it, the way the ocean carries everything it is given, and still returns, again and again, to the shore.

I sat in the car with my hands on the steering wheel, unable to start the engine.

Because something in me had shifted, quietly, painfully.

And I understood something simple, something the ocean has always known.

Sometimes a person doesn’t need answers. Not advice. Not inspiration. Not even comfort.

Sometimes all they need is a place to pour their words. An ear that does not interrupt,

a presence that does not turn away.

Maybe that is why people go to the ocean.

To empty themselves into something vast enough to hold poison and prayer, laughter and loss, without flinching.

Sometimes they just need someone like ocean to listen. 

That evening, for half an hour, 

I was her ocean!