The foaming waves crashed against the shell-speckled shore like charging bison, before receding like a mouse into its hole. Clouds drifted aimlessly across the sky, not sure quite what they were doing or where they were going.
I drew my knees up to my chest, my toes curling in the cool sand. I shivered slightly in my thin woollen jumper and wrapped my arms around myself, trying to keep in as much heat as I could. I hadn’t anticipated the evening being this cold. I still had around an hour before sunset, but I really hadn’t wanted to miss it.
Every Saturday, on the fifteenth of November, I come down here to watch the sunset. It’s kind of a tradition. Ever since the accident, I’ve sat on the side of this sand dune at twilight every year. To gaze out at the sea. To remember. Sometimes, I don’t want to remember. But I have to. It’s the only thing that helps.
Twelve years ago, to the day, I had sat here, talking and laughing and stuffing chips into my face. I had spent the whole afternoon out on the surf with Amy and Harris, smashing waves when they weren’t smashing me. It had been the best day of my life. I had only ever had two friends, black-haired, brown eyed twins that I had known since preschool.
Amy had been the daredevil, always trying to catch the biggest waves and stay on her board for the longest. She would go out as to where the best waves were just curling over and come whooshing past us, her gold flecked eyes sparkling and her mouth wide open in a huge grin. She’d come back out and laugh at us for our stunned faces.
Harris had been the protective one, always scolding his two-minute younger sister for her inability to think with any maturity. He would be constantly looking around cautiously, sure that something would get him. He had hated water, always terrified that if he couldn’t touch the bottom, something would leap out from its depths and attack him. I had laughed at it then.
It was getting a bit cooler when dad offered to let us borrow the dingy. It was not really much more than a tin can with oars, but the idea had been so exciting at fourteen that all three of us had piled in and rowed out into the waves.
If only we had noticed the clouds, dark and ominous, charging toward us. We, of course, only noticed when the rain started coming down. Light and drizzly at first, but soon changing into thick wet drops that made it almost impossible to see. We tried to turn back, but we couldn’t see anything but choppy waves and rain.
The swell had gotten bigger, flecked with bits of yellow foam and seaweed. A dead fish had floated past me, its eyes wide and staring. The wind was tossing us about in our dingy like we were some kind of giant’s toy.
That was when the boat had flipped. We had spilled out, yelling and spluttering. I can remember Harris screaming for help, unable to swim very well due to his fear of open water. I remember trying to help him, Amy and I grabbing onto his arms, then him slipping from our grasp and disappearing under the churning sea.
Amy had cried, screaming for him to come back, but I knew there was nothing she could do. I had told her so, but she had pushed me off and sunk without a trace. Amy can swim I had told myself. She’ll come back up with Harris and we’ll climb back into the dingy and get home. I had looked for the dingy then, and had spotted it drifting nearby, its pleated metal belly facing the sky. I grabbed it, calling for the others. I remember crying out and shrieking for the twins, howling to the wind. Then I remember the wave.
I had turned, as if in a dream, to look into the staring brown eyes of Amy, her pale hand in a death grip around Harris’s arm. A literal death grip.
For as long as I live, I will never forget that moment, as the wave took the bodies of my two best friends back down into the depths of the ocean.
I remember her dark hair floating around her face and a piece of seaweed wrapped around her neck like noose. Then I remember nothing.
I have held onto that memory for twelve years, not because I want to keep it, but because I can’t seem to let go. I keep on thinking that I could have found a way to save them, could have held on a bit tighter. I feel guilty when I think that I was the one washed up on the beach the next morning, semi-conscious.
Mum tells me that it wasn’t my fault, that there was nothing that I could have done. But I can’t help but think that there was.
They buried my only friends three days later. The bodies had been found, limply floating in a tidal pool, still somehow together, battered almost beyond recognition.
They had been buried in identical coffins side by side, in the same grave. On bad nights, I wish that I was there with them, sleeping soundly in the earth. I know that one day I will join them, and when I do, I hope they forgive me for waiting.
