I want my own Beach Episode

How to pearl a void

I didn’t start getting into anime until my late twenties. I quickly noticed that no matter the genre or style of anime, there was often a beach episode. The characters all take a break from their regular routine of mayhem and magic to chill at a beach together.

This excellent Screen Rant article by Joy Huddleston explains that these beach episodes don’t just serve as filler fluff, but rather offer an ideal setting “for the characters to explore their personalities and relationships in a new light.”

I want my own beach episode.

I desperately want to take a break from the trajectory of our world. The hate, the hurt, the hurtling tsunami of impending doom that often seems to swallow humanity’s best intentions—and I want a break from me.

All the expectations, the failures, the relentless routines, let these crumble like sandcastles in sea foam. Let’s go to the beach and play mermaid queens and kings for a day! We’ll take turns scrawling our names in the sand before the waves wash them away.

*Fun fact: my little sister taught me how to make this mermaid crown with a pie tin and hot glue.

I currently live in a landlocked state, but I’m very lucky to have wet my toes in many corners of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. I’ve played with the smooth stone gems of Pebble Beach, California, strolled among the pink saltspray roses of Misquamicut Beach, Massachusetts, basked in the sugar white sands of Sarasota, Florida, marveled at the ancient volcanic beaches of Hawaii, ridden a train beside the lapping waves of Japan’s shores, and trembled at the lethal loveliness of Iceland’s breaking crests.

These waters all make a hollow seashell of my skull, echoing my name without syllables. Calling something deeper and more primordial from inside me—

Waterborne

I can forget anything when I am swimming, even myself, from the tips of my arched toes to the ends of my widespread fingers sieving gallons of glory. Water sweeps away cumbersome angles and gives back what consciousness erases: connection. The deep blue link, deeper than veins pumping blood through our flesh, always lapping at the edge of our mind, murmuring what once we were, we may be again—one elemental body.

Nothing is too grand for my beach episode, so let’s share an impossible feast together!

I’ll spread a large towel with paper plates and break out the star dish from a cooler: a gluten-stuffed Angel food cake and fresh strawberries, bright as summer-ripened rubies. I won’t get hives from these illusory viands. Of course, there’s copious cream to slather on this cake and drown the berries in chilled clouds. We’ll scarf it all down and not leave a crumb for the greedy hovering seagulls as the ocean breeze whips our hair into our faces and makes a hot, sandy mess of us.

I’m grateful I can still imagine the salty sting filling up my sinuses. When I caught Covid 19 in 2021, I lost most of my sense of smell. It was a very unsettling experience to walk with my sisters on the shores of Hammonasset in Connecticut and smell NOTHING, catching only the barest tingling trace on my tongue with each deep and desperate breath. My sense of smell has largely returned now, but I will never forget wandering along the shore with a void I couldn’t escape.

In some form, we all carry such voids in our life, don’t we? Perhaps it’s simply the way of life, kind of like how every pearl carries a secret wound at its core.

Now that we’ve finished our feast, it’s time to swim. I won’t wait for you. Clumsy and free, I’ll splash into the shallow depths and let the waters buoy me as I dissolve into sea foam like an Andersen mermaid.

What I love best about the ocean is its loud constancy. I can’t think. My brain can’t spiral into anxiety when I stray into the zone of this vast liquid script. My mind rolls into reading the ever-turning pages of nature’s oldest story as the waves crash by my feet.

When I finally return from the water and leave my imaginary beach behind, my wounds and voids still go with me. That hasn’t changed. Yet I feel like maybe I’ve gained another layer of nacre from this brief mental respite. May we all find our own beach episode!