The tide wipes it’s surface clean every 13 hours, an etch a sketch sweeping aside the marks made ready for new ones. It erases mistakes, lines drawn in error, in the wrong place: a clean slate, a fresh start, a new and perfect surface. And it arrives in a different colour, with a different sound, and a different texture every day. It shows me that I do not have to be the same, I do not have to be strong, or persevere or persistent, I just have to be – to come and go as the sea. What it brings with it, may be debris cast overboard, it could be treasure. Energy fluctuates, ebbs and flows. It is rarely noticed. The tide is in, the tide is out, you have to watch carefully to see it shift, to watch it turn. You have to be very, very still to notice the precise point of change. Time marks the spot, the precision of the clock calls the sea back to shore. Time: a curious beast. Fast and slow it marches, rhythmic and solid, unwavering, it just keeps going. My sense of it is very different. Time comes ashore, tries to ground me in routine, but light and dark, the moon and the sun, shift and swerve and another day is passed. I lose count, one day, two days, seven days. Time creeps up, like the wolf, it is stealthy, silent, hunting. Then it hits me, it’s been more than two years, more than two years of feeling like this, so long I have forgotten what it is like not to feel like this.

The ocean, immense and terrifying, I collect small amounts each day. I think it will make it less immense, less terrifying. This feeling of overwhelming and unremitting fatigue, I think perhaps the sea will help. If I can control the ocean surely I can control my own body. This frail, feeble, pathetic house of a person I am. Not even a shell, a shell is sturdy and protective, a shell is beautifully formed. This house gives way easily, buckles and folds without warning.

The sea: an unpredictable constant.

The body: predictably inconsistent.