Swallowed by the Sea

Quentin and I wrote a short film. A Japanese civil servant takes his first holiday in France and walks the Breton coast on his own. Everything he comes to love there, the pines swaying, the smell of the waves, the maze of little streets, ends up pulling him back home. The film hasn’t been shot yet. For now it exists as a printed deck.

Then the bag took on water. Everything inside soaked it up: the deck, a notebook, two lenses. I laid it all out on a bench and photographed it before it could dry.

Water doesn’t so much destroy paper as rewrite it. It climbs the fibres, drags the ink along with it, and leaves it wherever it stops. Every page now has a tide line along its top edge, ragged like a coastline seen from above. A film about a man staring at the sea now has the sea in its margins.

A lens is a careful arrangement of glass and air, and water ruins the arrangement. It bends light almost as much as glass does, so a drop on the front element turns into a small, crude lens of its own, and everything behind it warps. Inside, it fogs. When it leaves, it leaves its minerals on the glass. You can dry a page. A lens you mostly just mourn.

His name is Makoto. He’s close to fifty, takes the same street to work and eats in the same restaurant every day, and he left his native village long ago and never went back. On the coast, the only things he falls for are the ones that remind him of Japan, until the small Breton port turns into the village he grew up in. The pages about him dried wavy. His face came through.

The last spread is almost all water: two people fishing off a sea wall, a lighthouse behind them, and facing them a blank page with a tide line across the top, where the water stopped climbing.