limestone

“I want to throw something into the water.”

The wind is biting cold and seems to come from every direction, so strong it makes me wobbly on my feet. Its whistle is the only noise around, louder than waves hitting the coast. It seeps into the cracks of my knit sweater. But the sun. I turn my whole body towards it, and wait and hope for it to warm me up whole. It burns a white blotch on the inside of my eyelids.

When I step up onto the biggest rock and look out at the ocean, all of Malta is behind me. We are standing in the extreme south of the island.

Last summer I traveled with my best friend to Portugal, and when I showed her all the green marks in my map where I wanted us to go, she questioned one dot sitting far away from the clusters of the cities we’d visit. “This is the extreme west of Europe,” I thought was enough of an explanation, but the appeal went over her head. My interest was endearing and grew into an internal joke when I mentioned wanting to visit the extreme southwestern point as well. I told her I remembered being fascinated with this since school, memorizing the extreme points of Brazil for geography tests. “If I stand there, all I can see is the Atlantic, and all of the continent is behind me.”

As soon as it hits me where we are, I text her, and I can almost hear her laugh again. “Looking out at the rest of the world?” she asks.

So I check the map on my phone again, and zoom out, from the scale of Maltese roads to whole continents. I trace a straight line directly south from us, and it meets the coast of Libya. The realization makes me smile. The only thing between me and the African continent, right now, is one thousand kilometers of Mediterranean.

“We should throw stones and pretend they’re things we wish to get rid of.”

These girls are the kind of friends who take everything and nothing at all seriously, at the same time somehow. Nothing goes unnoticed; they pick up every idea, every joke, and nurture it like a fire, throwing fuel to watch it thrive.

At Vinie’s suggestion, we all start picking stones straight away.

There is a faint trail, no wider than one person, cutting through the uneven rocks and shrubs all the way down to a rocky plateau at the edge, probably around a hundred meters over the sea.

We discuss the logistics down to every detail as we walk down. Olivia begs us to be careful and then slips and almost falls on her ass. Do we have to say it out loud, what we’re getting rid of? Jess laughs at Olivia, and then slips too and actually falls. “Each one can say it in their own language,” someone suggests. “Or not.” Who will throw first, or should we all do it together? We agree we can each say our wish out loud or not, in whatever language, as we want. The important part is to think of it. We take our time mulling it over.

I pick up a regular-sized stone, as large as the palm of my hand, hesitant to go for anything bigger. It feels wrong to interfere, like when people take home seashells from the beach. The storm must have washed out enough rock sediment in there already. The others also have small stones except for Agnes, who is cradling in both of her hands a rough brick of limestone, pale yellow and orange-ish. Olivia points out a fossilized seashell on the corner of it, a tiny spiral. “This proves that there was life here millions of years ago,” Olivia ponders, and I beg Agnes to leave the fossil and pick another rock; she argues that the sea water will preserve it better than humans on the surface.

I am the last to get down there, my legs reluctant to step over the ridge between what feels like mainland and possibly a whole separate rock. They are also aware of this but fearless, jumping on the rock to test its stability. Idly I picture it just toppling over, our collective weight being the last straw after the cyclone last week. But Olivia and Jess offer their hands to help me on the last step down, and I choose to believe it is stable enough.

So we stand side by side, facing the ocean, and when everyone is ready with their wishes in mind, we start.

Cecilia goes first, and I expect no less than a speech. She is the type to tell her life story to anyone friendly enough, and will start venting about her most personal issues on any regular tuesday over an afternoon coffee. Every time we hang out with someone new we like to tell them how we met, because it so perfectly encapsulates how much of an open book she is: she was behind me in line waiting to do some paperwork at university and just started telling me about how awful her period cramps were. I never worry when shares something personal and asks me to not tell anyone else, because I know that by the time I get there she will have told them herself.

But when she bravely declares her wish, it’s just one sentence, and it’s the exact same as mine.

“I want to throw away all of my insecurities.”

Ironically enough, I was not going to say it out loud, and I don’t. I just throw my rock in together with hers. (In retrospect, I might even call it progress that I took the exercise seriously and came up with something sincere. I think a couple of years ago I might’ve just cracked a joke.)

We all go quiet to hear the splash, and it is even more satisfying than we thought. The rocks take just long enough to fall all the way down that we start to wonder if we’re not going to hear the splash, but then we do and it’s far but it’s deep and wonderful. We pause the ritual to gush over how great the splash was in such detail you’d think it was a movie we’d just watched.

Agnes is next, and it’s only fair she has not one but a list of things to get rid of, proportional to the massive rock she chose. She counts them down on one hand as she says them all in Polish, and none of us understand anything, but I think I hear the word “problem” more than once. She then throws the rock, and even though it’s the heaviest, it takes a beat too long and she starts panicking that it has fallen on land under us, and ends up talking over the splash. Olivia swears she heard it, but Agnes is devastated to have ruined it for us. We comfort her and encourage her to pick up another big rock and try again later.

Jess’s wish is scary deep for a moment. “I want to get rid of my sickness,” she says, and I briefly I wonder if she is chronically ill or something, until I remember she’s just been recovering from a cold. It’s hardly even noticeable now, but I guess it was the first thing to pop into her mind. In any case, having learned our lesson, we stay quiet to hear the splash this time, and it’s another solid ten out of ten.

When Olivia’s turn comes, she waits for everyone to settle down and pay attention, and chooses English over Maltese so that her wish is clear to us. I’m awed by how sincere it is, how seriously she can take this, and I realize my fault in mistaking her coolness for disdain. She is wearing beige dress pants and a sleek black t-shirt on a spontaneous sunday afternoon hike and her sharp sarcasm is delivered always with a straight face, oftentimes intimidating, but she’s never passed up an opportunity to be silly and make it theatrical.

“I want to get rid of my anger, and of everything that makes me angry, so that I can live a more peaceful and happy life.”

The moment is so melodramatic and beautiful that we all naturally clap. Her stone, the smallest of them all, sways with the wind before hitting water, the splash almost imperceptible.

Finally it’s Vinie’s turn, and it’s only fitting that she is also making a scene of it, the moment she waited for since she came up with the idea. She is not intentionally a dramatic person so much as it comes as a natural consequence of everything about her appearance and how she carries herself like a mermaid and also a model. I met her in my photography class and proceeded to remember her as the girl who brought two analog cameras she’d inherited from her grandmother and who dressed like she’d fallen from a preppy aesthetic board on Pinterest. Her entire vibe, lord forgive me, makes her seem like such an insufferable human being that I doubt I was the only one surprised to find out she is actually immensely sweet and genuine, which happened upon one or two minutes of talking to her.

She announces her wish so fast and loud that my brain fools me into hearing the words “angst” and “ex” but it turns out she said neither of them and was actually speaking German. I’m still wondering what she’s wishing for when she lets out a wild scream like a madwoman, and throws her stone so fiercely that her aim doesn’t even go beyond the edge.

The stone simply smashes against the ground in front of her, or rather the rock we are standing on, and shatters into a million pieces; a splash of limestone on limestone.

(If the “rock” in rock paper scissors was limestone, then maybe the scissors would win.)

Never had I imagined I would ever see Vinie so flustered, even though we are utterly thankful to her for providing us with such an unparalleled moment. (“Tonight you will all go to bed and sleep like babies and I will be embarrassed remembering this.”) Amidst the sea of roaring laughter, I ask her what her wish was, and she translates: she also wanted to get rid of her anger, an irony that brings us even more joy.

She later picks up another rock and throws it properly into the water, and we clap and congratulate her on finishing the ritual, but what will stick with us is the smash. This little exercise, the whole day really, it all bonded us together and provided us with enough internal jokes to last the year; and we should have plenty of time to laugh. All of Olivia and Vinie’s anger, and Agnes’s problems, and Jess’s sickness, and mine and Cecilia’s insecurities, they are now decorating the ocean floor at the extreme south of Malta.