It reminded me of the thin chocolate coating of a mini egg- the way it shattered underfoot. Small like money, a penny on the shore for pirates maybe. A seashell so delicate it split into bits under the weight of my sole. I didn’t swallow the way he said I think I love you because it was not material like the shell, but gaseous with worry, invisible. Instead, I swallowed the cracking thing beneath my shoe, took it in like take-out on a Friday, and I took in the heater in the van too, how warm it was to have been told such a thing, and the way he reversed up the road from the sea, into a wall, and meekly laughed at his own mistake with me, then at the way I sung a song in a language I couldn’t pronounce; Italian. A song about loving the world. A song I knew meant love without knowing any of the words at all.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote a book about money and I read it on my lunchbreaks when I was earning too little of it. I liked learning that shells were once a currency, and in knowing so, realising that this man who thought he loved me on the beach, had given me a shell as a gift, which was filled with even smaller shells, and bits of sea glass softened by the brutality of the sea. These are for you, he said. It would have been, one day, long ago, a small fortune. I couldn’t accept it. I left it on his bedside and collected my own fortune instead - little pieces of shell from my swim that I left on the dashboard of my car as I wailed like a storm about the storm happening around the two of us. The height of sincerity. The muddiness of ourselves.

When I was a sixteen year old girl, a seventeen year old boy gave me a seashell with a piece of string tied from it, and a metal clasp to fasten it around my beck. The boy was the first to break my heart in two and the first to part my mouth open for a reason other than eating, breathing and talking about my A-Levels. He was my first kiss. The shell necklace he made is a talisman I have kept at my bedside, through every sequential heartbreak. It reminds me of the smaller versions of myself. The ones who thought I could not endure pain again. Not like this, I exclaimed. Not again.

But I have

and I do

and I collect shells as I do it

and I do it slowly, alone,

with a shell in each hand,

breathing into the confusion of big feelings,

and I take the shells with me to the houses of these boys who are now men,

with rocks in their windowsills and shells in their bedside tables.

And then, these shells come with me in boxes as I move to new places, apartments and bedrooms, shimmying at the back of the moving vans that my Dad has driven me away in, us beside on another in the front seat, probably eating sandwiches, him saying -

You don’t half choose them, do you?

You don’t half choose the rotten ones -

and I nod, because I never choose in halves. I choose them wholly, for their gaps and problems. Their cracking teeth and the lies that skim past them. The way they make me feel like the best person in the world and like the person that never shuts the fuck up, knows nothing, does nothing. I drive away from them with the talismans in my pocket and my Dad at the helm, and a feeling like a cracking shell underfoot, but in my throat instead. A heartbreak that compounds into a sentiment that may only be described as familiar.

And when I go to parties, or dinners, or houses, with new people, and I see their shells, or the eucalyptus branches in their showers and the cactus in their windows. The dried cow parsley from their ceilings and the wishbones on their sills - I am reminded that we all come from hunters and gatherers. Collectors of things. I am reminded that every house gathers dust like every person gathers memorabilia. That we all move in and out of houses, and take little things with us.

That none of us are special, and so I am infinitely so.

Sometimes I imagine that I am a home to move into, in the hollow corners of a night. I am the staircase and the doorway. The bed frame and the shadows. I imagine I am the pieces of shell and rock in my windowsill. I watch as the bodies drift through. The boys and the men and the heartbreak. I watch the break down like snow drifting from a rooftop. It creaks, threatens, drops, but I survive. The house survives, and I leave it again. Deposit withdrawn, out of pocket again.

Dad puts my things in binbags, wheelie bags, sandwich bags. We drive away. Over and over and over.

I carry rocks and shells in my handbag with me now, and sometimes they fall from the fastening as I pay cheques, ride the tube, walk the parks. They tumble to the floor, scatter about me like omens.

Dad tells me to lock the door and throw away the key this time. I listen.

Another one, this time a half boy-half man at the cusp of understanding and adulthood, was standing beside me as I asked a cutler to write my name in a blade on the top floor of a bending skyscraper. We watched the lines appear in silver - little shards of metal flicking away from the knife leaving illegible letters of Japanese kanji. I put the thing safely in the part of my suitcase where the lining had ripped away from the shell, and we continued South, fought and combusted. I was keeping the knife safe so that I could get home after our trip around Japan and begin domesticity in London, with a serious job and a serious life and a destination that lead me to prowess. I forgot about the safe place though, and the serious job, and the destination. Instead, I incrementally contacted the half-man to ask if he had seen my knife. His answers shortened with each text I sent as the seasons passed and more time had elapsed apart than the time we had spent together.

Have you seen my knife?

No - he replied more recently. Just ‘no’.

The week I ended my last, different, separate relationship, with a different man, barbed wire necked and soft at the edges, I had rekindled my affinity and longing for that knife from Tokyo. I dragged him to my parent’s house and sat him at the dining table as I peeled through my wardrobe, luggage, that very same suitcase, three times, no luck. The boyfriend didn’t understand why I cared so much about this knife all of a sudden. He then became one for history, but the knife remained in the house, somewhere. Waiting.

Missed calls. Missed calls. Missed calls.

There is so much about that time away, in a van, in Japan, during a record breaking heatwave - begging that boyfriend from another time to let our route coincide with rivers, lakes and seas - that I ruminate often. Maybe because the days are shorter and the places I explore are collapsing in on themselves with familiarity these days. The roads I drive are not winding toward prefectures, but to parts of my past that are so engrained in my memory that I can drive them in a daze, in my dreams.

I remember lowering myself into a city river, dirt at my toes, dust at my ears, trying to cool my body down and still my mind, listening to him say you’re disgusting.

I remember wishing on an eyelash for solitude.

I remember passing out in a 7-11 bathroom from exhaustion, only to be woken up by the cashier with a packet of frozen satsuma segments and a smile more knowing than any smile the boyfriend had given me over the weeks we had been travelling together. He was a person desperate for direction, and I was a person desperate to be his destination. But we split like oil and water shortly after that road trip, and the knife I bought in Tokyo stayed lost for years - wedged in my thoughts whenever I spent time at my parents house; the building I knew the knife was waiting for me inside. As long as that knife was lost, I had a tether left to that boyfriend. I knew that the day I found the knife was the day I could finally unravel myself from him completely. Like the last piece of string holding an entire rope together. Instead of a grand opening, mayor-like with scissors, it would be a grand closing. Me.

Dad says I saved that boyfriends life. That he had never seen sadness quite like it. That I had sharpened him, drawn life into him like the bath I bathe in my parents’ family home, with the knife by me, tub side, glistening. You’re better off without him. You were losing yourself in him.

I imagine myself far away, in Tokyo maybe, with the knife in my hand, thinking - I am a sharp woman. Precise.

Damascus knives look like oil and water splitting. Damascus knives look like two people breaking up. They look like unease.

I think about flying away on a plane. I think about never coming back.

My parents found the knife this week. It’s never cut a thing. Instead, it has waited for me. Hidden for me.

Last month someone broke into my house. Through the interviews, the nightmares and the whispers, I drove to the army surplus shop and bought myself a pocket knife. It too, has not cut a thing since I bought it. It too, is in a slot in the bag I carry with me. I hope I will forget about it, because that will mean that life moves, always, moves. But, I don’t think I will forget about it. I think, like the damascus knife from Tokyo, it will relentlessly glisten in memoriam of the people I have been. That even if I lose it, I will always miss it, want it close.

On the beach tomorrow morning, a burnt log, black as sleep, will sit on the shore. It will look like a dead pixel. I will feel as though my vision is compiled of tiny digital particles, and that one of them is malfunctioning, causing a black hole in my view, perfectly square, centred.

A serene beach.

Tomorrow morning I will be standing beside a man who will be going to Australia very soon. I like him often, but mostly when he is beside me, in the rain, on the sand. He will not understand the pixel I will point out, and instead will say

It’s a log.

His dog will run to it.

It’s just a washed up log. It’s not a black hole.

When he goes to the other edge of the world, he will be just like that log - I will think to myself - he will be a black hole left in a familiar beach and I will feel that hole he will leave whenever I see the sea. I will feel so much longing that I’ll feel as small as the seashells he will try to give me, one last time, before he leaves. The seashells that are a small fortune, that I will not be able to accept. And when he is gone, I will look out at this beach, and there’ll be a puncture in the view, and it will make my throat hurt and my eyes cry salt and the hole will be in the shape of his body, not in the shape of a log, and no one will understand it, no one will see it, but I will see it.

And you will see it, too. Because you will be there.

I fast-forward to a fortnight’s time. He is gone. The beach is empty. He is another character in history. I am cutting onions with the knife. There are seashells under my feet. I feel one crack and imagine him telling me that he loves me, and I am in all of these places at once. My edges fray like a piece of string holding together a thick piece of rope. I am heartbroken. I am peeled by the damascus knife, and the wind is ripping through my ribcage.

I got what I wished for in that dirty river in Japan;

I am alone.

I fell again, over myself,

in loving memory of

whimsy

and

I tried my best to fight the wind

but it made my eyes sting

(the love did)

and

it might not have,

had I been wiser but

you can’t plan for these things.

Did you know that

it’s

a piece about loss,

this?

You move out of a house enough times to realise that they are all the same

windows

doors

and a carpet can always be refitted

but the shells

those things are precious

irreplaceable

and the words I love you

feel different every time he says them

because

he

means something different

to everyone.

Turns out, I am a childless child

I know but nothing,

and am terrified of all these missing parts,

the dead pixels on the screen

these people that leave

the sea incomplete

the beach incomplete

my friends live far away now

as will you,

of course,

and you will not come back for me

as you shouldn’t because

you are beautiful and big and deserve to see

all of the same

because

you are a sharp knife of a person

as am I

(or was)

a sharp knife of a person,

blunted a little now,

which will have to do.

And we will never be the same,

not after this sentence

or this year.

Will you still love me, without me?

My corners,

fray fast.

I am that familiar coastline,

while you are the sea, remember?

There’s that saying, isn’t there -

If they stayed with you

through the storm

then you were loved

and so

of course, you should leave now

because the storm has passed

as much as rain can do,

and I will stay here

cut my hair with a knife

like I am the protagonist

with an angular disposition

and an oozing center

and you will come back different too,

forever altered,

back you come

to the beach,

another man among the other men,

but you will say

and they won’t,

haven’t

ever,

let’s go for a walk

you and me?

to that rock where that log washed up

and I will know

the exact

spot