How many barnacles do I have to caress to be denoted in the history books as mistress of the sea? I know the touch of the ocean like most know red wine on their two front teeth. It’s matured me. Watered me until I couldn’t grow any more. Anorexic in my tendencies I flourished in the sand. All that hard mineral, dusted me. It grated me down to my smoothest form. The salty air brushed my hair to the side. That rich gust tore through all the most flat, mousy, unappealing parts of it. Filled my sun-lit head with knots made of itself. The ocean taught me how to sculpt myself of myself. It taught me that the only material I’d ever need was right there staring back at me. And you might ask how I’d admire myself by the sea. There are no mirrors nailed onto the sides of boardwalks; the only reflection the blue onto the sky. (Even that is just refracted light). But you have not seen yourself until you’ve tried to find your best angle in the oil-spill pearlescent insides of a clam shell. A half of a whole, lost its innards and other half to the tides. Ripped away by the lunar pull. That’s how I know myself. In the heat of the sun, made by the desire of the moon.
Hot sand, cold water. I did not know these two things were okay to be at the same time until I spread myself out to be darkened by the rays. Until I blessed my burnt skin with the fingering of the shallows. The cuts on my ribs, stinging from the astringency. The scratches on my hands practically opened up and said their own Hail Mary. You’ve never known burning until you’ve lived a life of sin just to find yourself bathing at your Mecca. And the first time I finally felt a burning consequence of self-hatred, was when I found a pool of water and in a way that was just short of Narcissus, drowned myself in that wavering image that blinked, so tearfully back at me. Did you ever think of that? Drowning in the ocean that resides within you? Ebbing back and flowing forth with every respiratory plead for life. This is how I warmed up to myself buried in a million grains of sand.
The sea also knows this, as it absorbs sunlight, and warms. As the earth heats slowly from within and the salt water is warmed in that way too- hit from both sides at the same time. This is consuming the land we all know so well to walk on. But look at it like this: it is bringing the shallows life. Frigid waters are feeling the skins it never thought it would. And this is the self-portrait of suicide that the ocean threatens us with in response. I have felt the ocean in the same way as these new creatures. Hands of a foreign entities rising from dark-blue depths; their palms pressing in on me in every state I have ever allowed myself to be exposed in. And maybe these creatures and their hands knew that I had already fallen in love with the ocean and the way it laid its hands right into me. The second its temperature felt around in my stomach, performing some type of surgery. The ocean numbed me– anesthetic in itself– so it might understand me less cruelly. This initial burning of my oceanic cleansing has had no comparison to the grappling of those who have reached their hands into me with no question. And they have shoved around all my organs and replaced them with heavier rocks. So I am weighed down perpetually, in the ocean I survive within eternally, by a touch that lasted no more than 5 minutes. No, the ocean understands this torment. The inconsolable nature of understanding something only you have bared witness to. So the sea closes my eyes with that natural saline. And it leaves me bruised and purple with its chilled lashing twists. Yet this is less unapproachable: if I am left observably in pain, people know so well to be gentle. And this is when I asked the ocean to break my heart, as I thought it might be easier to live afterwards, made ugly and unlovable by the ocean’s kind scars.
