Oyster by Olivia Linnea Rogers

    Sean O'Brien CC




Oyster

We pile into a car with bags and jackets in tow. The summer is a smooth, brown-speckled chicken egg waiting to be cracked onto the sizzling concrete of hometowns.

We drive past fabulous, postcard sceneries. With lush greenery, swooping fjords and staggering mountains. Velvet moss crowded around crystal clear water. Trees tall and proud and patriarchal. We feel proud to be Norwegian.

It is the bare beginnings of summer. The warmth starting to crest our skin. Not yet hot enough to freckle. Two months prior we sit in white, cramped classrooms. We learn what it is to be sublime. It is something terrifyingly beautiful. They show us 18th century art by lucky boys who got to be painters. Of waterfalls and mountain tops and crumbling stone walls. They tell us to think of how grand it all is. They tell us to focus on the details. They tell us to imagine where we are standing in the painting. They tell us to imagine how we feel.

We are four girls, we are 18 and 19, we are cropped and long brown hair. Lost virginities. We harbour birthday-gifted champagne and half full vodka bottles, wrapped in flannels and denim cut-off shorts. We are smooth skin, big hearts, short fingernails, wide eyes, dirty jokes and drifting apart. We are topless sunbathing; we are sun cream. We are cheap crisps that cover your fingers in greasy film and gritty salt, that you wipe off in the grass or lick off. We jet down long stretching, pale grey, roads in an old car that smells like the very opening of the world. We feel the wind in our hair.

We are happy music. Music that calls you “baby”. Music that meld with the air, like it belongs there. As much as the trees belong in the ground and the clouds belong in the sky.

We fall asleep in our clothes of the day, grass stains rubbing off on sheets. We wake up, dewy-eyed, and brush our teeth hip to hip, in bathrooms that haven’t been refurbished since the 70s. We don’t why anything would need to be made to look new. We study old puzzles of kittens and drink from faded neon plastic cups. We feel the scratches of growing up under the softness of our fingerpads.

We are bare feet in coarse grass, running from mosquitoes, borrowed hair ties and tampons. We leave each other’s homes and head for the water. We want to dip. The fog has lifted, the air is clear, and the bigness of life sits perfectly in us. 

We pick strands of grass off our bare feet. The skin under our fingernail’s blushes lilac blue. We plummet off hard, plastic slides and plunge into lush, natural water. We forgot how nice it is to swim, like children do. We plug our noses and clench our eyes and sink deep into it all. We hold hands and dunk each other’s heads under, goose bumps prickling up scalps, cooling flushed heads. We laugh and scream. Our skin ripples around our forms. We haven’t noticed the womanly bodies we now possess. We don’t care.

When I am under the water, fully submerged, I feel it is the closest thing to being gone from the world. For a moment I am perceived by no one but myself. I get to leave my bodily form, on the worn, wooden dock, fade into the dark water and only know myself through feeling. I am there only in thought. I can’t separate where I start, and where the water begins. I have never felt so in place as I do here. I do not need to imagine how it feels. 

We feel. Till we have to go up for air. Shattering the film of the water, gleaming, wet hair surfacing, we exist once more. We leave in the same old car, with damp hair and brilliant smiles tucked under our tired faces. The evening creams around us in darkest blue.

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Olivia Linnea Rogers is a Norwegian-British fiction and non-fiction writer. And poet if you’re lucky. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Queen Mary University of London.
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