‘Date Night’
‘Date Night’ was published in Hoot!: Words from the Otepoti Writer’s Lab Community, Rivulet Press, December 2024, p73-75
A month after the cyclones, we went to the beach for date night. I snorkelled alone, hugging the rocks, while L walked on them. The cyclones dredged up cold water from way out and brought it into shore along with chopped up bits of marine debris. The water at Te Hāwere-a-Maki was cold and murky, too cold for L. The resident tāmure snapper followed me through the channel, but I did not go far before I turned around.
Above water the sun was dropping, the water and the island yellow-tinged, dripping in gold. We walked shoulder to shoulder combing through the detritus littered everywhere over the beach. Two huge pōhutukawas pulled down in the cyclone from the cliff above lay splintered and waterlogged on the sand, grotesquely bare and empty of their once resident shags. Each retreating wave revealed dead or inert things: broken kina and limp jellyfish, plastic shards and shell fragments, wood soaked to the colour of rust.
Amidst the tendrils of decomposing kelp and tumbled stones, we found a dozen mustard-yellow orbs. They smelled awful, but L piled them in the crook of one arm while I Google-image-searched ambergris. I spent a long time staring into my screen, willing the shade and description to shift ever so slightly towards what we carried. ‘It isn’t ambergris,’ I said. The orbs L held weren’t highly sought-after pieces of coughed up sludge and squid beaks from the inside of a sperm whale, but putrid and waxy, yellow-grey lumps of rotting marine sponge.
We abandoned the orbs and ran-danced to the sea’s edge to wash the smell off our hands, laughing because we so badly wanted the putrid thing to be the desired thing, but the smell followed us to the car and to the house we don’t own and into the shower.
We dream of freedom from our paid work, of a place of our own, of time to spend on our deep work: writing, making, fishing, gardening, being in the world. We forget we are already free; we are safe and there is time. We do our deepest work of being in the world. We do our paid work and grow vegetables and selectively catch fish. We subsist. We do date nights. We spend time underwater just looking. We explore mangrove channels in the kayaks where maybe no one has ever been. We walk the coast at Te Hāwere-a-Maki and explore the cyclone-changed shore. Slips slowly integrate into the landscape, but we remember the old topography, the trees that stood there. We accept and remember. We remember the cold summers and the cyclones when we could not light a fire for all the wet wood, and the dry summers when we could not light a fire for the danger of stray sparks. We pay attention and we go to the water, and we take things in hand, and we set them back down.