Just Like Mine

The sand nestled itself between my little toes. I had never been to the beach with my mother before. Usually when I visited her we would go to the park or just cycle around the city, with me on the little seat at the front of her bike, my eyes navigating our way.

This time however, she took me on a short train trip to the coast on a mid-week day somewhere in May. She smelled kind of funny. A mixture of a rosy perfume and cigarettes, and her skin had something strangely familiar, in its somewhat pale complexion.

Back home it always smelled like fresh bread, as we lived on the second floor above a bakery. But that day when my mother came and collected me, it was the first time I realized that she, despite her constant smoking, smelled actually very nice and not just because of the perfume. For the first time in my life I felt a kinship and more than before I was interested where my mother would take me this time.

She had to choose the train compartment filled with a bluish layer of smoke and lots of grownups. My polite coughs were unnoticed until the dunes appeared from behind the clouds. My mother started talking, something about when I was a baby or something, but my attention took another path towards the windows that had a picture on them, a red circle with a hand holding a bottle.

We walked from the station across some grey, cubical houses towards the beach and I started running towards it, into the sand, leaving my sandals behind. I had been to the beach before, just not here and not with my mother. She slowly took off her flip-flops and walked towards me, into the sand and smiled at me.

I ran towards the sea, cold at first, but warmer on a shimmy. I saw my mother standing just before the shore. I looked back the other way. The sea had a gradient that went from a darkish muddy brown between my feet to a grey blue, ending up in a stark and abrupt dark ending at the horizon, only interrupted by the grey-whitish waves. Above it all, a pale blue sky was watching, with some laughing seagulls flying in formation in front of an impressive army of woolly clouds.

I walked back to my mother, who was now sitting in the sand, smoking a cigarette, looking at me with some frowns above the eyes, but also static, unmoveable, seemingly in deep thought.

She started talking again, but I noticed my wet feet had absorbed all the sand and little balls of wet sand were starting to form on my skin that I could rub off gently with my hands. Now and then my mother would stop talking and I would look at her, with her blue veins slightly visible through her skin and her blond hair, just like mine.