You rushed to feel the stillness of the ocean on your legs when the tide went in. When the tide went out, you nudged me so I could feel the water, too. We drew our breaths in this movement. I brought you to the ocean to make you understand the fluid of our heavenly bodies that weren’t heavenly at all. The lifeblood is slightly esoteric, and I warned you before we headed east towards the ocean again. You didn’t care. I laughed but I was scared for you.
We stood together at the brink of the world, beaming out at the horizon where air met water and earth met sky met land met ocean and we stood there at sunrise. The orange and reddish hues of the ether were no distraction, because you were too busy confronting yourself with your failures, your inability to understand things without experiencing them yourself. I tried to make you forget them with my eyes, with my hand on your chest, with my forehead pressing on yours. But no matter. You cleared your throat, and began, “Isn’t it so much easier to do nothing, nothing at all?” This lie is sturdy because it washes your truth away, I thought.
“There is no one like you,” you tried to begin to say, once more. And I shook my head, laughing. We made our insides itch and our heads ache, but we remained in each other’s arms, never responding to each other, noting our lives with no news to return. I laid my heart at your feet, and you never wiped it before you picked it up.
I brought you to the ocean to show you that this is where the crux of my life was claimed. You were insistent on being in the ocean to comprehend it, me, completely, and I didn’t understand why. You unabashedly tried this often, to break through the temporal, and you always did it profanely. In my head I responded to the question you asked, earlier. It is easier to do nothing. It’s true. Instead of being here, I thought, I’d like to open my window and gaze on high with my hand on my cheek and count the clouds that pass by until the sky becomes dark and vast and littered with stars.
I relish the days when I was around people who made me forget I was ever born. They made me ignore my hands and knees, the neighborly blood in my veins and that I ever had a mother who called my name when she needed help in the kitchen. I felt this painfully, while you knew this painlessness. And I was jealous that the fluid that made me flesh made you numb.
You took a step into the cold water. You spun in circles summoning this whirlpool, unknowingly. You didn’t take things into consideration, you never thought before you spoke, and you never looked at the time to notice the future happening before us, right now. It was the accident that you wanted, the purpose I tried to steer you from.
They told me to tell you it’s going to happen. I didn't want to, but I told you, this is that burning feeling in your stomach when you’re extremely uncomfortable and you can feel your body. You said, I feel like furniture is skidding around inside me. The tables and chairs are all rumbling to no end. My organs are cementing themselves into the wrong parts of my body. It’s like trying to stop rain in midair. It's like getting to know every single ant. I stomped on the anthills and prayed for the rain to stop. I told you I'm sorry. Before the stinging began, you wanted to indulge in the softness of all this. You're this same way when chocolate melts in your mouth and you flinch, because of your cavities. But I never slap your hand when you reach for chocolates, I whispered to you.
With the ocean, you knew that the rhythm of the tide followed the moon. With yourself, you flailed and rarely anything ever went swimmingly. You’ve been following this amoeba-like, bodiless dream. In replacement of waiting for the panic to set in, you traced the sinews of my back to calm you, reminding yourself of the other movements that you know, to translate yourself into this movement that you didn't. It never worked, and you were not ready.
Pictures of you and I, they don’t exist. But still, I conjured them up in the mornings and in the nights. When you were away in the ocean and running with the tides I wanted you to put thought behind your behavior. I shouted into the water at you, the veins in my neck becoming vivid as it held up my screaming head. The sky was in my way, saving you, especially. The orange and red hues darkened the ether as the night rode in. And I, I stared at the horizon, looking away from you as the waves swam towards me to grieve you, this liquid funeral procession that I condensed in. It wasn’t that you were gone, it was that I knew you’d return, powerful or indifferent. I was worried that what was dear to me would be jaded to you. I really hoped that it wouldn’t be that way, especially given my recent visions of you resuscitating yourself. My body undulated between these modes of anger and happiness, pain and joy, panic, and calm. It lived in me, this pain, and I was scared that you’d see it and patronize me. God gave me this pain, you see.
I swayed with the course of the wind, the earth reminding me of the stake it has in my heart.
Fiction writer, essayist, reader