![]() ![]() It is white and naked with a protruding tummy and bottom. I pick up a tiny – it would fit in a matchbox – headless, handless, footless porcelain figurine: a grisly find. Today something catches my eye in the tangles. Usually it’s a piece of plastic – a drink bottle, one flip-flop, a crisps packet from 1993, bits of fish crate. When beachcombing, I get used to noticing and homing in on anything that looks a bit different among the pebbles, caught in a rockpool or buried in the sand. These things were worn out and washed up but they were not always useless. But I also think of the things I have found from the sea: the fishing boat, the seal, the “ambergris”. I think of the things I have lost: my compass, stolen laptop, two shoes – one in the canal, one out of the door of a moving car – my boyfriend. I was washed up: no longer buoyant, battered and storm-tossed. When I first came back to Orkney I felt like the strandings of jellyfish, laid out on the rocks for all to see. My options were ever decreasing and I didn’t know where to turn, desperately seeking comfort in sexual encounters and obsessive memories. My once promising future, for which I’d moved to London, was turning into bitterness and frustration. I was out of work, living in a tiny room in east London, not getting invited out, heartbroken and drinking alone. It stung because at that point it was fairly true. A few years ago, I drunkenly got into an argument with someone I shouldn’t have. ![]()
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