take me to the sea

The last time I touched the ocean, I hadn’t swum.

I had been accompanying my grandmother’s sister on a four-day trip to two seaside villas on the coast of Pangasinan, the place where she, my grandmother, and my mother had been raised by the same woman – my great grandmother who I only ever knew as a frail, bedridden woman called Inang. The first villa that we had gone to was on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. There was no beach nearby, only a dock visible from the room that I slept for two nights where fishing boats were tied up. The second villa was littered with sand – along the floor of the gazebo where stray cats begged for our table scraps and in between the crevices of our mattresses which lined the floor of our large, empty sleeping room unceremoniously. We went to the beach only on our very last morning there and I did not want to have to sit in our van with sea-tangled hair.

My great-aunt and her friends – a group of women that she had dormed with at nursing school some fifty years prior – put on their swimsuits on dove into the water. I stayed closer to the shore and let the warm seawater lap at the ends of my shorts. It had been the very end of January, a few weeks before I would return home after two and a half years of living abroad and a few weeks before COVID-19 would render the world frozen. If I had known, I would have swum, I think.

I have been in search of the sea ever since.

Last summer, my sister and I drove up to Georgian Bay, which opened up to Lake Huron. I had read somewhere that the Great Lakes of Canada which I had been in close proximity to for my entire childhood were known as inland seas for their features which seemed to mimic the ocean. But when we stopped on a hike to scramble along some pebbled shore and dip our bodies into the water of Georgian Bay, I was shocked immediately by the frigid temperature of the water. It was too cold to swim and too cold to wade in – too cold to do anything but sit on a large, warm rock and watch the shapes of the stones along the lakebed morph through the sunlight refracting through the nearly transparent water.

This is not the ocean, I thought to myself. But looking past the water at the wide, distant horizon where sky and sea met in an ethereal blue that saw no end, maybe I could pretend.