Lisa watched the sunlight peek out from underneath the plaid curtains that hung on her floor length window. She wore purple silk pajamas all week- and she clasped her hands together on her lap as she sat curled on her worn out sofa in the dark living room of her small home. Lisa stared at the ceiling and at the wall, and let her thoughts run wild… her granddaughter. Her darling granddaughter, Olivia, died about eight months ago in a horrid car crash, setting her own daughter in a coma and the father in hysterics. Her son-in-law tried his hardest to move on and still be there for his wife; however, he did let his memories consume him and believed that Olivia moved on to a better place. Lisa wouldn’t. Her grief consumed her still, but it seemed in that moment, it was different. Lisa spent months of sitting alone staring at the ceiling, but she was tired of the dark and the sameness. She wanted to be outside and to feel the sea that sat right by her front patio. Lisa got up, slipped on a t-shirt and a skirt, put on her straw hat, and crept slowly outside to the sweet ocean breeze
.

Lisa walks around the white rock beach, listening to the sound of the ocean and breathing in the deep scent of the sticky air. The clouds are gray and puffy like a pillow, and she goes back to remembering when her and Olivia would run on the beach after it rained, stomping on the deep puddles and laughing as a cold drizzle would run up their boots. Lisa presses her hand to her mouth; trying to contain the whimpering and stop the tears stinging her eyes. The memories are over powering, and she kneels down onto the hard white pebbles; the sorrow, as it would seem, seeps her strength. She looks down onto the white stones, hoping to erase her memories when Lisa remembers another:

Her and her daughter were walking on the beach. Her daughter couldn’t have been more than ten, and they frolicked hand in hand, listening to the waves. Nobody spoke a thing. Then Lisa picked up a stone and smiled.
“Now, watch this!”
Lisa threw the stone into the ocean, making six or seven waves bounce beneath it before it sunk into the white froth of a wave, and laughed as her daughter clapped happily, a toothy smile playing across her face.

Which lead to another memory…

Her, her daughter and Olivia were there when Olivia was six, walking hand in hand together silently through the gleam of the cresant moon bouncing off the sea. Olivia wandered off, picking up a white stone and flicking it swiftly into the ocean. Lisa yelped an I-didn’t-know-she could-do-that yelp as the stone hit the dark sheet of glass six or seven times untold it landed with a soft “Plop” in the water. Lisa’s Daughter smile warmly at her mother, and Lisa smiled back just as warmly, storing the memory in her mind and her heart.

Lisa will go back that gray day to her house and throw open the curtains, letting the sunlight sink back into the living room. She will call her son- in -law and demand he come pick her up, asking that he didn’t delay any. She will tighten the grasp that she held around the two white stones that she took from the shore, think about her daughter she had forgotten, and sit back on her couch roughly. She will wait. Once she reaches the hospital, she will sit down slowly by her daughter’s hospital bed, put down the two whites stones in her hand on the bedside table, and hum the sound of the ocean, her eyes closing in memory.