Hag Stones on Hurst Spit

- not quite inertia -

We collect stones with holes through them on the beach you grew up, while you read to me about fertility from your phone. We’re on a ridge, pebbles drifting from each side of our feet, and there’s an island covered in trees in the distance. I am holding a rum and raisin ice cream. You, salted caramel. My skin is red with warmth. Each word you read makes sense to me in the way magic makes sense. I believe in fertility like I believe in fairies. Like I believe in my eyesight from my bed, in the thickest dark. I know I can see. I know my vision exists.

I also believe in fertility because I have been pregnant twice in my life. I know the signs in myself like cattle know the signs of rain. My body adapts, bores into itself, reverses.

I don’t have children, though.

Used to ward off witches, to enter the fairy realm or to encourage conception, Hag Stones have been folkloric talismans for centuries. You read on, and I press my eye against the hole in the rock we just found, looking for you through the little gap. Instead, I find the sun too soon, framed by stone, and cry saltwater at my misplaced affection. I love the sun. I love you.

My body is a hag stone. I feel myself pierced by the sun, by everything, these days.

It’s summertime, and the children play out on the street on their bikes, and I hear them laughing and it makes me cry saltwater like the sun does. I listen to that song I wrote about a few months ago, and hear a lyric that fits like water in a cup; I'm 85, I'm 60, I am a mother, a baby.

There was this one time I followed a toddler around a supermarket. You told me I needed to stop, sadness in your eyes, and worry, as you picked at a scab on your elbow until it bled and stained your trousers. We are the same. We are the same thing. We were just doing our own version of the same thing.

I am moving to the sea this week. I will watch the sun go down and the water go on and on, and there will be fewer people there, fewer pregnant people, fewer children. More stones with holes in. We can collect them together. We can collect the stones with the holes in and you can read to me about magic.

I remember telling you about the years I felt like a witch. Strong and terrifying and misunderstood, waiting to burn, carrying a secret that was frightening to others. Now I feel like a soft, ground down stone. Smoothed. Ever softening, ever disappearing into an eventual sand. Tiny, tiny, tiny, unassuming, small.

Back on the ridge, rusting car parked in the distance, you realise that I don’t like my ice cream as much as yours, and so you let me try yours once, twice, three times, four, five times. My stomach hurts from all of the changes that are happening between me and my body and you and my friends and the old apartment and the new life and all of the cows milk, but we’re too far down the path to go back, so I keep eating as the pain expands and bores the hole bigger into my stomach. I feel myself hollowing out. You let me hold your hand this once. I focus on the floor, on the holes in the stones, on the hole in my stomach, on the raisins and the salt. I keep going through the discomfort. I bend over, fold in half, roll to the end, make myself small so the wind can’t knock me over.

Later, over cake and tea, my neighbour pokes fun at me for my nervous energy. He can see that I am a knot of noise and feeling. I like him because he sees through me, and tells me so. Hides little of myself from me. It feels good to have a mirror handed to me. It feels good to be told who I am now. I believe him. I take myself in and go upstairs, home.

At the overpriced shop where I imagine my life in linen, I try on a dress I like. I try it on in my usual size, and then I ask for the size smaller, and then the size smaller, and again, smaller still. The waist is the width of my upper arm. I can’t breathe. I contort. I coil into it, breathe out all of the air I could possibly let go of. I am emptied of the outside world. It’s just me with me inside.

I come out of the changing room, white and cold-wet-skinned. I breathe in the air of everyone else. Of the city, full of dust, full of baby laughter, dirt and conversation. I wait for the air from the sea again - the kind of air that throws itself at you, into you, through you.