A Day at the Beach
Isabel Fontes
I woke up with nothing to do — another suspended day in the long summer holidays, one of those days when time doesn’t seem in any hurry to happen. The phone rang several times, insistent, and I ignored it until I couldn’t anymore. On the other end was my cousin. He said just one word:
“Beach?”
That was enough. Half an hour later, he was at my door, surfboard under his arm, wearing the kind of smile that always managed to pull me out of the house before I had time to invent excuses. I splashed my face with water, grabbed the first pair of swim shorts I could find, and we left without much conversation, as if the day had already been agreed upon long before.
On the way, we hardly spoke. We saved our words for the sea. When we reached the beach, I fixed my gaze on the water — calm, blue. Several thoughts passed through my mind at that moment, but I didn’t have time to linger on them. Just being there — the silence of the morning, the sound of the waves — was already another way of breathing.
And it was always like that, every summer: the two of us, cousins and almost brothers, slipping away from the world and into the sea before the beach woke up.
As the hours passed, the beach began to fill. The morning silence slowly dissolved, replaced by voices, hurried footsteps, and balls flying through the air. We watched it all from a distance, stretched out on our towels, like spectators at an inevitable show.
That was when a man with a shrill voice appeared, armed with a megaphone and an energy that didn’t match the heat of the day. With exaggerated enthusiasm, he announced a sandcastle-building contest. Prizes included. My cousin looked at me and smiled in that complicit way that always precedes a bad idea.
“Shall we?” he asked.
I laughed. I said no. I said I was too old for that. I said I didn’t have the patience. All useless. Before I knew it, my name was already echoing through the megaphone, mixed with others, as if it were perfectly natural for us to be there.
I knelt on the damp sand, surrounded by children who seemed to have everything planned. While they raised tunnels and walls with alarming efficiency, I stayed still, staring into nothing, waiting for an idea that wouldn’t come. My cousin, beside me, was enjoying the situation, laughing more at the chaos than at the competition itself.
Time moved on and, suddenly, I realized it wasn’t the prize that mattered. It was the gesture. Building something there, knowing the sea would eventually take it away. I did the simplest thing: a castle. Nothing elaborate. A bridge, a tower, crooked walls. An imagined place for someone who needed saving, even if only in my head.
When the contest ended, we didn’t win anything special. Some place. A quick round of applause. But we stayed there, looking at the castle, satisfied, as if that had been enough.
Maybe it had.
After the contest, the heat pressed down, and the sand had started to burn. We looked at each other without saying a word. There was no need. The boards were there, waiting, leaning against each other just like we so often had over the years.
Entering the water was always a small shock. The cold bit first at the feet, then the legs, until the body finally gave in. The sea was clean, calm on the surface, but with that hidden strength you only notice after the first fall. We moved forward side by side, pushing our boards, laughing at each other’s haste.
The waves weren’t big, but they were enough. We rose, failed, fell. Loose, genuine laughter — the kind that only exists when no one is watching. When I missed a wave, he laughed. When he fell, I laughed. That was how it was. Always had been.
We were cousins, but in the water that didn’t matter. We were almost brothers, bound by a simple code: fall, get back up, try again. The sea taught us that without words. There was no competition, only sharing. One person’s mistake was entertainment for both, never humiliation.
I remember the silence between one wave and the next. A thick silence, broken only by the sound of the sea breathing. In that brief interval, everything made sense. School, problems, the future — all stayed out of the water. There was only the present, the tired body, the salty skin, and that rare feeling of belonging.
The falls hurt sometimes, but never too much. The laughter always came first. Maybe that’s why those mornings stayed with me. Because in the middle of effort and cold water, we learned something simple: being together made everything lighter.
We came out of the water tired, dragging our boards across the wet sand. Heavy bodies, light heads. We sat side by side, without speaking, watching the sea do what it has always done: advance, retreat, insist.
The tide was beginning to rise. The castle I had built hours earlier was no longer whole. First, it lost the bridge, then the tower, then the walls. The sea didn’t hurry. It took things away slowly, as if it knew exactly what it was doing.
I watched it in silence. I thought about how much time we spend building things knowing, deep down, that they won’t last. Maybe that’s why we insist. Maybe that’s why it’s worth it.
My cousin was there beside me. He didn’t say anything. There was no need. There was a quiet understanding between us — the same as always. Time had passed; that much was true. We were no longer the same children. But something had remained intact, stored somewhere between the sound of the waves and the old laughter.
When we finally got up to leave, I looked at the sea one last time. Where there had once been a castle, there was now nothing. And still, I felt that nothing had been lost.
Some things fall apart. Others remain. And the sea, that one, keeps reminding us of it.
Isabel Fontes
Isabel Fontes was born in Lisbon and lives between Cardiff and London. Her work has been published across Portugal, Brazil, Spain, and the UK. She co-created Jazz’n’Poesia, hosted literary sessions in libraries, and developed cultural television programs. Her writing is intimate, restless & attentive to the ephemeral.