Northumberland straight.

Sandbars were the best. I could walk for miles and miles before the water came up to my knees. I knew how to tell the time by where the sun was in the sky and how red my skin was. My hair turned golden-white and my nails were pitted and dull from the sand. I poured sand out of my shoes each night, I wriggled on the seat in the diner for not having..er, rinsed it all away and I crunched on grains of it in everything I ate. I was a toxic cocktail of sunblock and orange pop and aloe cream. I slept when the sun went down and rose to meet it on the shore in the morning. I ate Pixi Stix for breakfast and lunch, french fries and lobster legs for dinner. I had ice cream ten times a week and I had no use for popsicles whatsoever. I couldn't work those and would wind up with a slushy grape puddle at my feet every single time.

I ruined my mood ring, so I scraped it off my finger over wrinkled, puckered skin and I threw it far into the waves.

I went through a bathing suit a month and lost more towels than I can count, leaving them somewhere on the beach when I went into the water and having no idea where I put them when I came out. I learned I have amazing, difficult diseases like Fresh Air Syndrome and Wanderlust and Beachcombitis.

And Wanderlust remains the one we can't seem to cure.

I would walk so far toward the horizon I always expected to begin to greet people coming towards me who might speak a different language. Lochlan was forced to spend forty-five minutes to an hour in a slow-jog through ankle-deep water at low tide to tell me to turn back, chastising me for throwing my watch into the water because I had transcended time and errands and chores and home. Home? What the heck are you talking about? I am home. This is home. 

I felt lifted above the constraints of life out of the water, buoyed by the heavy salt smell and the curiosities below the surface. That's what it is, then. I thought to myself. I'm a mermaid! And he must have figured it out to because he doesn't seem all that irritated at the lengths he has to go to reel me back in, to bring me reluctantly back to dry land.

Tell me why I'm discontented
Will I die without the details in my hands?
I feel these vines surrounding my heart
I fear I'm moving at a slower pace again
Tell me how this all unfolds

I can't find the secret to survive
To grow old safe and sound
Life is sifting through like the sands in the hourglass
There's not a moment to relive my time and space
There's not a moment to undo anything