Something at the beach.
by Madeleine Medeiros
There I lay in my new pink bikini, towel draped over every arch and indentation of my face to shield from the unforgiving sun, my mother sitting a few feet away.
Even though I had covered my face and turned my head, I could still hear them laughing—the two women only a few yards out on the water—floating on some garish rainbow unicorn floatie innertubes. It was that carefree laugh that all lucky women belt out when they’re with their best friend. It sounded like pure, unadulterated fun carried out across the Cape Cod breeze.
The fused ribs of my sternum sank towards my spine, which rested on the indent it in the sand below me. It was as if my chest was being pulled through the sand to the core of the Earth, the depth and weight of what I was feeling. Was it the heat of the sun leeching through my tasseled Turkish towel, or the lump of my sternum rising to my throat, pushing out big bubbly tears, like the plunger of a syringe?
I tuned back into the laughter coming from women in the water, but my head was with someone else.
****
Despite it all, I write.
It’s 7:00 pm, Monday, March 3, 2025. I’ve just gotten the news that someone near and dear to my heart has months to live. My mother sobs and collapses at the foot of her bed, which I sit on. I don’t react to it, I just stay sitting like a freeze-frame of a movie you don’t want to see the end of. I am still, quiet, stoic.
Writing down the thoughts and events that race across or slug along my mind won’t make reality any less…well, real. It still feels abstract and foreign, her death, she’s still too real and present to accept that someday soon she will simply stop being.
When authors kill off book characters, I feel it. It hurts, but not for too long. When people die in books, it’s easy to understand the pain of loss from an outsider’s view. Their death is two-dimensional. It fits neatly within black print lines on flat white pages. So-and-so died, leaving what’s-his-name alone to deal with the aftermath of the loss.
That makes sense. It’s literal, concrete, analyzable. When you close the book, you can pretend that character didn’t die. After all, it is just words on a page. You can go on imagining the happily-ever-after and would-have-been because you know that the unhappily-ever-after and what-really-is is just as delusional—made up by someone with a tendency to explain away expectations and real-worldisms.
Death in literature always serves a function, even when it doesn’t. When literary death doesn’t make sense, it can often boil down to the author’s design; to surprise readers and teach them that Death is irrational, unbiased, and should be expected. When Jay Gatsby was found floating in his pool, I knew it was a metaphorical death: He spent the better part of a decade waiting for Daisy to choose him when she never would. His demise, one way or another, would always end with him being alone—whether in life or death—because of the destructive nature of his vain pursuits.
But death is more than just words on a page. Grieving someone who’s still alive is confusing. Grieving someone who’s still alive and just told her sons she’s going to die is heartbreaking. Yet I don’t feel anything. I’m swirling with numbness. It took me 13 minutes to rev the engine of my brain to get me to start thinking again—another 4 to get my hands on my keyboard.
When people die in real life, it’s like throwing an onion into a black hole—the laws of physics, of all reason break down. The layers fragment into different dimensions and nothing makes sense.
Despite it all, I write.
I can’t analyze a woman as she dies. She isn’t literature. Even after she goes, she’ll still be as real as the nails on my fingers. I can’t analyze something that wasn’t designed by an author. Real death—or at least this one—serves no purpose, teaches no lesson, bookends no prologue.
One may argue that God is the creator and author of all things, and this was just an unfortunate and untimely part of His plan—but then again, I was never taught to believe in God.
My conceptualization of God has always been the stereotypical Dumbledore-in-the-sky drawing out blueprints for humanity, so I never really gave it much consideration. I have always struggled with the idea of a venerated being…How could God be a single entity? Shouldn’t it be bigger than that? More transcendent? More abstract? It feels commercialized, inauthentic, baseless, and cheap. No way I could buy in to that. How could someone hear the voice of God or feel His very presence, as organized religion claims? Perhaps to make something infinite comprehendible to our finite selves.
I feel at peace at the beach. I’m comforted by the fact that when I look out at the horizon, I see water touching the dome of the sky and nothing else. I like the not-knowing—not knowing what lies beyond the horizon or what God means to people or what happens after this life. I don’t think we’re supposed to know, and that’s the beauty of it. I may not believe in God, but I believe in something.
Despite it all, I write.
Whenever I’m there, I sit on the end of my towel, bury my feet in the sand and lay back. Then I shove my hands down into the sand by my sides and bury them until I feel the cool wet layer of ground. I feel the earth vibrate and rumble in communion with the waves. I hear past the families arguing about sunscreen applications or the lack of ice in a cooler and zero-in on just the waves throwing themselves restlessly at the shore. I hear the cries of the gulls and cheeps of the sandpipers. I hear the scrabble of my hands under the sand.
Despite it all, I write.
Whatever made me, made me a storyteller. There’s something inside my soul that has always been there, and it’s an innate knowing that allows me to weave together what nobody else can in ways only I can. It’s instinctual: Despite it all, I write. I love when people light up when talking to me, they see that I’m interested—no, invested—and understand that their story matters.
****
It is Thursday, October 9, 2025.
That day in July, two weeks after her death and one week after her funeral, I listened to the laughter of what could have—should have—been Mama and Diana, and my chest shuddered with each sob, and my nose began to run like my eyes, dripping down the sides of my face, evading the tent of the one on my face, and soaking into the towel below me.
If something was there then, it let me say goodbye to Diana, feel her one more time—for my mom—and told me that she hated the picture of herself on the funeral program. The last time I saw her was at my high school graduation the year before, on a sweltering May evening, with her boys, one of whom was graduating with me. I want to remember her like she was that summer: blonde, occasionally—well let’s just be honest, shall we?—often letting profanities slip, and bubbly. She looked perfectly herself.
She was the woman who would pull up in her big, black SUV and sip white wine on the porch with my mom. They always let me sit with them, never holding back or censoring their conversations, even when I was little—we were those women on the floaties tipping their heads back as they laughed outrageously.
And all I can do now is write.
