memories of the dead. Many spirits linger, discontented, under the
grass surface.
If you spend as much time here as I have,
you start to see it.
Precarious crosses hiding near the cliff edge, sad bouquets gripping onto
forgotten fence posts, few congregate at the top of Beachy Head.
Mark Fisher once wrote that the “the sensation of the eerie clings to
certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes”. It emerges “when there
is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing
present when there should be something”.
Here, both are true at once.
There is nothing – nothing really marks the true extent of the loss.
They died so silently, and the quiet remains.
Yet, there is also something almost ineffable that remains. You hear it on
the wind. Perhaps the occasional creek of an aching old tree is their
voice. The harsh salty sent of sea air scratches at my nostrils.
A staircase is etched into the cliff face – I clamber down and find myself
staring out to sea.
The sea stares back.
She whispers a repetitive refrain that only I can hear, drawing me in,
closer.
The intoxicating melody of the rush of waves matches my breath.
I stand still, awe struck and steadfast like a Neolithic stone.
The landscape holds me, silent and motionless. I breath.
The pebbled, raw terrain reaches out for miles at my side. White chalk
rocks smoothed by sea and soft enough to crumble in my fingertips litter
the cove.
I hear a tiny crab as he tip-toes at my feet.