The Sandcastle

Nobody can ever imagine what it is like to lose your love but I cannot ignore the elephant in the room if I am going to blog my journey.

So I have chosen to share my experience through an analogy. It is rather a long analogy but I hope you will bear with me as I try to paint a picture of my loss by telling you a story I have written…

One day, a little girl was playing on the beach and decided to build a sandcastle. She only had one bucket and she knew that although it was possible to build a castle with her bucket, she had far bigger plans.

You see, this girl didn’t want to just settle for the kind of sandcastle that appears after a few firm taps on the bottom of the bucket because she had bigger ideas. She wanted turrets, and a fortress wall and a drawbridge and a moat and well…the list goes on.

Anyway, she gets to work on it. She spends a bit of time carefully mapping out the boundaries and deciding how she is going to build this masterpiece and uses her finger to draw an outline in the sand where she will make the walls.

A little boy has noticed what she is doing. He is all alone, just like she is and although he is shy, he plucks up the courage to ask her if he can join in. She likes the look of him and also on a practical note, she sees that he has a bucket too and she agrees that they will work together and make this lovely castle.

All afternoon, they play together on the beach and craft the most wonderful castle. They dig out the moat and squeal with laughter as they run back and forth to the sea with water and try to fill it up.

Later on, as the sun goes down, both of them know that the end of their fun is nearing as they will be called back to their family to be told that it is time to go home. And so quickly, they both use the shells they have gathered to put the finishing touches on their castle and without noticing that the tide is coming in, they stand back and admire their construction.

It is quite simply the best castle that anyone could ever make and they are both so proud that they built it together.

But suddenly, from nowhere or so it seems, a massive wave comes crashing over it and in one mighty swipe, the castle has gone.

It is absolutely obliterated.

The little girl looks on in horror. She feels an overwhelming sense of disbelief as her whole body feels like it has gone into shock. She couldn’t see that coming and there was nothing she could do about it.

She stares at what was once the castle. That beautiful castle that she had been crafting so lovingly with her mate in what felt to her like a lifetime. 

She can just about make out the boundaries of it but the walls and the turrets and the drawbridge have all gone. The shells are scattered all over the place – just fragments of a reminder that just moments ago, things had been so very different.

And now she starts to shiver and cry. She turns for comfort to her mate.

But he has gone.

She falls to her knees and scrambles around trying to pick up a tiny shell. And holding it in her hand, she knows already that as small as it may be, it will serve as a reminder of what once was.

At that moment in time, the whole day just seems wasted. All of that effort to be left with nothing and no-one that will ever truly understand just how magnificent that castle was.

She vows to tell people about that castle. And the day on the beach with her mate who helped her build it. But she knows that they will never really understand. They will never really get it.

For Bebe. I can’t rebuild the castle without you.

I will build another castle. It won’t be the same but it will still be magnificent.