Adulting Beach
It was my last year of school. I felt like I was on top of the world. Headgirl, good grades and Mum's depression had taught me to grow up. I had realised pain through her and therefore felt I had somewhat met the real world. I was forced to serve, to give the same love to her as she had to me: unconditional and unquestioned. I began dreaming. Who would be my new role model, if not my mother?
During the night of our school Prom, my friends and I got drunk and went to the beach. One of my friends' had a party at her house after the school event and so we changed our outfits, from our fancy dresses into shorter ones. The whole ordeal was absurd, now I think of it. Well done, you have completed five years of doing something you are socially forced to do and how do you feel? We were drunk and confused. Only sixteen, some fifteen and completely drunk. Most of us had known older friends who could buy us alchohol, mostly cheap vodka and fruit cider. We stumbled to the beach together around midnight, arm in arm, about twelve of us, boys and girls. We stripped naked at the shoreline and puppeted our bodies across the stones and into the stirring waters. It was not a calm night instead, a summer storm - fitting and reckless - and being so intoxicated, none of us felt the cold or at least, I didn't. The waves were crashing and us girls were screaming. Now it seems almost ritualistic, a symbolic unleashing of our slowly adulting souls. Who were we each to become? And were our expectations of the future so different? I have an image now of my best friend at the time, lying naked on the stones of the beach laughing and her creamy flesh glowing under the halfmoon light. The boys were all up in angst, wild too, their testosterone crashing onto the shoreline like a sea of their own. We were all so young and lost. The floating, though sacred, youth of one of Britians' many isolated peninsulares. What could the sea of the future offer? It was all so untamed and dreamlike.