When I was a child the littoral zone was an exciting realm of wonderment. The space where periwinkles were fleeting. Where you could jump over the foamy edges of the lapping waves or race to avoid wet toes. It’s a universe in a moment. 

Metaphorically, the littoral zone has been tugging at my mind as I explore grief. I’m grieving. I will never not be grieving, but it ebbs and flows, and the tide is sometimes strong and sometimes not. I’ve finally come to terms with the grief of job loss and I feel renewed. But in doing so, I realized that this isn’t the grief that sits closest to the surface. It’s not the grief that’s defining – the moment the wave changed the shape of the shore. That came earlier. At 15 when I lost a family friend. Not quite family, more than friend. The littoral zone of relationships. I never felt entitled to the grief of losing a sibling and yet anything less felt insufficient. This is where my grief got stuck. 

I’ve now lived more life after than before. Yet this moment has never left me – a constant ebb and flow. An acute awareness of temporality took hold. I think it made me cynical as a young person – cold, aloof, brooding but not in a cool way. I’m not sure I ever recovered from that socially. And while the dark moodiness of youth has long since gone, I wonder if I didn’t harden permanently along the way, like a callus that forms around an injury, I formed my self around the wound. I became the protective layer.  

I’m an adult now and how resilient I am. I’ve weathered all storms. I stay solid, dependable, afloat. My contingency plans hold – I can pivot to plans B through G. But resilience requires a weakening that doesn’t deliver a mortal blow, a knock that sets you back but allows for recovery. In order to exist, resilience requires hurt. Resilience might be the cuckoo that kicked optimism out of the nest.

Resilience has served me. That’s why I kept it around. But now I wonder what it would be like to throw caution to the wind. What it would be like to take a leap without a plan or three. Because as much as the callus protects, it comes at a cost. Uncertainty became uncomfortable rather than exciting. I stopped playing at the edge of the waves.