This summer all I have been able to think about is the sea. A persistent, nagging fantasy haunts me: to escape to a seaside town in New England where no one knows my name.
I grew up surrounded by the Great Lakes. Technically we lived on a peninsula, not an island; regardless, there was always a lighthouse within my vicinity. So I suppose the idea was planted early and the inclination was always there.
The beach was such a happy place during my childhood. I built elaborate sandcastles and awaited the eager tides that would inevitably destroy my creation and let it return to the water.
I liked to watch the dogs run along the shoreline, to throw bread to the seagulls. My family and I unofficially adopted a one-legged gull who made his pilgrimage back to the beach every summer. It cost a nickel to ride the beachfront carousel.
The first time I saw the ocean was when I was twenty-three. I moved into the upstairs room of a rental house in Kitsilano and watched the white sailboats from my balcony, reading books from the nearby metaphysical stores and smoking my roommates’ weed.
It was uncharacteristically hot that summer, so we spent a lot of time talking on the deck over a few ice-cold Coronas, sharing our origin stories. How we had all ended up in Vancouver. Whether the blueish haze over the mountains and the salt air would compel us to stay.
I imagine at some point someone must have asked me if I had ever seen the ocean. At that time I lived mainly with Europeans (and one functionally alcoholic Australian), so the concept must have been more foreign to them than it was to me.
I felt very young and uncultured, being this excited about something that was normative to them. At Point Grey Beach I walked into the water up to my waist and was immediately struck by something like reverence.
The endless expanse of sea and sky, the unexpected ferocity of the churning waves, made clear my smallness. I could not fight this; many others throughout the long channels of human history had tried and failed.
I have always been one who does not flinch at danger but instead feels something like the death drive activated. I enjoy adventure. I’m not a loud and dramatic thrill-seeker, but I will quietly appreciate a moment that reminds me of my mortality.
Yet I was unprepared by my visceral reaction to the ocean. The awe and terror that the sea inspires in the mortal, a story told by a thousand minds greater than my own, was a new experience.
My dad always liked beach towns. I never really understood the appeal.
Then a few things happened that changed my mind.
During the pandemic, I was writing a very different sort of novel. It was a project that, looking back, I can acknowledge I was terrified of, in much the same way as I was terrified of the unnervingly fierce waves of the Pacific Ocean.
It was large and heavy and uncomfortably honest. I feared what it might reveal about me, about my family, about my worldview. But the first chapter had gained me a place in the Curtis Brown Creative Writing My Novel class, so I assumed it was marketable enough to do something with.
I wanted to power through the fear and make it out on the other side with a flawless manuscript that would actually sell. Yet in my heart of hearts I was terrified of writing the story and found it burdensome in many ways.
At the same time I was saving money for a move that never happened. My heart was very set on upstate New York at the time: close enough to the city to make it easier to attract more affluent Brooklyn clients, but close enough to home that I could hop on the Amtrak and be home in a few hours when and if my grandma died.
I never bothered finishing the pandemic novel as it finally, inevitably, got too heavy for its own good, both thematically and psychologically. I was drained.
Suffice to say I never made it to upstate New York, to the end of that project, or to my querying trenches.
I got waylaid by the very event I had been worrying so much about.
Almost immediately after the death of my grandma I allowed myself to set aside the weight of the pandemic novel. I turned my focus elsewhere. In that moment I wanted, unsurprisingly, to write a tender sort of story, one about the complexities of grief, the growing pains of adolescence, and the humility of adulthood.
The story that formed from the ashes was one that looked like a Nantucket summer and sounded like the James-Betty-Augustine love triangle.
The songs I was listening to on repeat, soft-girl anthems, were all mysteriously titled after, and presumably set in, quiet and enigmatic towns on the East Coast. I became obsessed, during the spring of 2025, with depressing bedroom pop and the surprising intimacy of the lyrics.
Did Claire Cottrill really attempt to take her own life in Alewife, Massachusetts? What happened in Augusta, Maine, and why was a Hollywood director’s daughter spending time there? The songs told curious stories; I drew upon them for inspiration.
As June was ending, I interviewed for a job in Hudson, New York. One part of the role would involve managing the company’s Substack. I tried to imagine myself there. It was a city I’d had on my radar for a while: a sort of sanctuary city for the cultured and mildly pretentious New York elite who wished they didn’t have to be city people.
I didn’t necessarily hate the possible future I saw ahead, but I felt no tremendous, overwhelming peace about it, either. I was secretly relieved to get the rejection email.
I spent the majority of July despairing over several things: my third month of persistent underemployment that had left me utterly demoralized and exhausted, my grandfather’s failing health, the distance growing between myself and a long-time friend.
I applied for many jobs, interviewed for some, and got placed in a sort of limbo as various clients all seemed to face bureaucractic issues at the same time.
The uncertainty of my own future became even more markedly clear one night when, like a bolt from the blue, I realized I had been writing a novel that desperately wanted to be a short story instead. Of all things, this is what I felt peace about.
What is to become of this story? This ode to millennial adolescence and grief and faith and grandmothers and beach towns? Well, I still believe it has value. I will continue writing it until it reaches its logical conclusion. And when that happens, I’ll share it here, as I did with my novella Wildflowers.
What type of response it receives is inconsequential; I am writing it for myself.
This has taken so much of the pressure off, to make it something more than it is. The dreamy magical realism, self-contained snapshots—they are enough as they are. They do not need to carry heavy existential weight or significance.
On the other hand, the pandemic novel certainly did.
I can feel it calling me back. I wonder where to go from here. Do I resurrect it, daunting as that may seem, or simply focus on writing short fiction for now?
If Substack is now “where the agents are,” surely the dream is not impossible. It might look different than I had imagined, and it might take longer than I had expected, but it isn’t out of the question.
It’s okay, sometimes, just to surrender your dreams. To admit that you’re tired of the chaos. The waters can be rough for a time, the waves unpredictable, but inevitably the tide will always come back.
loveeee how u write omgggg i wanna connect w writers like my style of writing wld u wanna be mutuals,? i posted yesterday too if you’re interested⭐️🦢
This reads like a love letter to grief and salt air at the same time. The imagery of the sandcastle returning to the water was beautifully done.