by Joanell Serra
Accretion
When you hold a seashell in your hand, you feel the delicate ridges around the edges. These are growth rings, and like the rings of a tree, they can be used to estimate a mollusk’s age, maybe even its experience. Shells are shaped by their circumstances: waves that drag them through sand and silt, months spent buried deep in sediment, creatures that burrow into them, captors who crack them.
If I am a shell, my growth lines are multiplying too fast, as if time itself has quickened. I was once a floating mollusk, bumping serenely along the ocean floor. Now I face perils: otters’ dexterous paws slamming me into rocks, bristle worms rasping themselves into my shell, toxic wastewater seeping through my mouth, riptides pounding without mercy. When did everything begin to spiral?
July 2022 would be the obvious answer. July 1, to be more exact. That’s the day a gastroenterologist placed an eel-like tube with a camera down my husband’s esophagus. Or maybe July 3, when the doctor called with the dreaded results. Things spun faster over the long weeks of summer as radiation progressed and reality set in. And again, that fall, when I made every meal in a blender after he’d had a massive surgery. And then, just when a shell might have settled into something harder, we discovered the reason my usually loquacious husband was having trouble finding words: a brain tumor eating them up, one by one. My shell grew more rings.
It’s not only trauma that reshapes identity, though; healing transmutes as well. On spring evenings in 2023, we often perched on a beach in San Francisco and watched the sun dissolve into the slip-sliding ocean while the dog frolicked on the hard-packed sand. A day out from the latest chemo infusion, or ominous brain scan, we felt stunned by these proofs of normal life: sunlight lifting off the waves, a child’s pictures in the sand, the pelican’s dive.
We had crashed onto a new planet, a place where nothing seemed real, or permanent. Second chances, we learned, demand growth. Gratitude while tending to a terrible illness forces its own kind of stretching. Longing carves new grooves through my mind, while fear is the undercurrent, always pulling at my feet.
Perhaps it’s not that our life is now on a different planet, but that we are aliens, visiting our previous lives. We examine the detritus of our past for clues: wine glasses, travel books, white high-heeled boots, a pickleball set. All things we no longer need. There is so much to release.
It’s 2026. This morning, I am sitting on a new green velvet couch, tea steeping, my dog at my feet. She has journeyed with us to New York, where she must miss the West Coast beaches but has discovered a love of rolling in snow. We live very high up now, twenty sterile floors above the East River. The apartment is near a hospital that offers experimental treatments we could not get in California. For now, they’re working.
Outside the window, winter rain ripples the river, and I think of the sea. The dog and I wait for the sound of the door opening, for my husband to come out and join us. I am a changed being, my shell thickened by pain, the taste of salt water still on my lips.
Author Joanell Serra (she/her) is a writer living in New York and California. Published in many journals, her books include the novel The Vines We Planted and the anthology (Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Pandemic. She writes non-fiction about the intersection of mental health, spirituality, and cancer caregiving and fiction that brings speculative elements into domestic stories. She received her MFA from Randolph College.
Artist Mauro Marinelli is an artist who lives and works on his farm in Spencer, New York.
Gulf Stream Magazine 