Write to Mary

Dear Mary,

I was lying on Saunders beach on the weekend. We live in Sea Point like you used to. I just found that out about you. It might sound stupid, but it made me feel weirdly closer to you, knowing you might have walked where I walk, read your book in the exact spot where I was reading mine.

I was staring at the concrete wall in front of me, my peripheral vision guarded by the edges of my sun hat, and imagining I was in Brighton, England. Not much differs from the two places, sand with shells half exposed, a careful avoidance of carelessly discarded cigarette butts, sea gulls calling to one another in the not so distant background. I can hear the waves creeping closer as the tide comes in. Good thing we've scootched ourselves as far up the beach as possible.

There isn't much of it, beach I mean. Saunders is a short sliver of a bay, bookmarked by large rocks and sheltered ever so slightly from the worst of the wind. But you probably know this already.

We like to come for a few hours to bake. Others come here to get baked. The sickly sour scent of weed and vanilla tobacco are annoyingly strong at this time of day. So much for getting out into the fresh air!

I often have moments like this, imaginings, elsewares. A few seconds that are entirely mine because no one else can see or hear what I'm thinking and feeling in that brief moment. Did you ever have those?

Sometimes it happens when I'm trying to fall asleep. I try desperately to think about anything other than the mountain of responsibilities that I know will flood my brain tomorrow. What ever happened to the ideal of the 'quiet life'? The one I picture ladies living way back when in Brighton where they'd been sent for recuperation? A brief respite from the noise and chaos and responsibilities of the city.

Alas, no longer! Now we're working women, women who wake up each day and put our minds (very capably) to work.

Gone is the dream of sitting in a magnificent glass house in the countryside, working away for months at a, at best, mediocre piece of writing but feeling exhilarated through it all. Where time is measured by how many walks one has gone on that week, how the flowers are fairing at this moment in the season, whether the sun is setting sooner than it did a few days before.

Now we measure time in quarters. We're boxed into 'productive hours', the rest helplessly unproductively, useless.

You'd probably tell me to stop being so dramatic and just get on with it.

Dear Mary,

It's a strange feeling, missing someone you never got to meet. I think about you a lot, wondering and imagining what it would have been like to know you.

To really know you. Would you have liked me?

Would we have walked on the mountain together? I like to think so. You would have told me stories about what life was like when you were young, how wild things were, how wild you were, and about your daughter, who I adore.

I started reading a book recently called Swann's Way, it's Proust (which means I'm taking a really long time to read it). He starts out by describing moments from his life, one of them being a memory of his grandmother, hardy, resilient, determined. The kind of woman to run into a storm because she loved the feeling of rain and wind whipping her hair against her face.

It made me think of you, because I'd imagined you as having a similar obsession for adventure.

I never got to know you. But part of me feels like I could know you.

So, I've decided to write to you, to try and get to know you.