The beach is noisy. The sand, lovesick, clinging to my skin. The sun, clawing into me and peeling up layers. The light, buzzing, hungry; oil pooling on my skin, perfect for deep-frying. The sand squeaks, like rats hide beneath, shifting like they’re impatient to scrabble up my legs. Flys grope each crevice of me, emboldened and unafraid to die, licking my sweat like a chip scraped along the last vestiges of chicken salt.
The people are amplifiers. They open their mouths and out pours the crunch of sand and the deathcry of seagulls and the feeling of tripping in front of a crowd.
When I step to the water my foot recoils. A shock of cold, the sting of salt. Waves of warped gravity repel it. I step forward again and water consumes my ankles. Sand clings to the hair on my legs, glistening like it’s trying to heal how ugly I am. Another step and I recoil again as sharpness greets the soft underbelly of my foot. The sting grants a shrill numbness. Another step and my shins are buffeted, like a shoved child. They petrify under the chill barrage.
And I feel salt and sweat and sun gnawing at my shoulders, skin on my scalp peeling, hangnails stinging.
I am a foreign body. I don’t belong here.
When I try again, to step into the water, hands grapple my wrists, pull me backwards. My heels drag and I lose all capacity to carry myself. My body is dumped back on the sand, a life vest strapped around me, and my eyes sting with salt and tears as feet walk away.
I cannot be trusted.
I sit until nightfall. Sometimes I rest my toes in the lapping water, attention held by the rhythmic beat of the waves. The birds quieten, offering solemn goodnight calls, and only distant cars echo any kind of movement. Eventually I am all that remains. Alone, in a glowing orange life vest, on the dark beach.
I scramble to the water. Pull the vest off as I run, flung as another bird in the air. The waves shove at my legs. I push forward. The salt scrubs at my eyes and they blur and writhe. My limbs are heavy and untrained, useless hollow things as this great creature scrabbles for my throat. But I open my mouth, expand my diaphragm, and let the ocean crash into me.
Something changes as I’m sinking. I am carried out and all pains of that last world are left in it. The moonlight is translated through the water; patterns miming the waves above. The water around me is gentle, embracing. Weightless like that moon so far above me.
I am no longer burning, no longer shocked with cold. My body forgets itself from the water. It flows through me like it knows all the paths of my insides. It warps off my back as I descend, twisting around my legs, wrapping under my arms like it's holding me, carrying me gently to the floor.
I am a creature. My clothes turn into fish and disperse. And I hit the bottom like settling onto a couch with a friend. My shins find grooves in the sand, thighs in divots of smooth stone. Anemone support my neck and shoulders, hair twisting between their limbs, spidering out and intertwining me with the coral bed. My hips and heels find homes in rocky moulds, locking into place like a dog curled behind my knees.
The water of this deep, eldritch place runs through my lungs like they were built to hold it. There are water-hewn tunnels through undersea cliffs, paths through the dark stones of the earth, and we all hold great seas. As I settle, I am a part of the ocean floor like I was never anywhere else.
My hair pools around me, exploring like eels through unknown crevices. Fish swim through the hair on my legs like its seaweed, taking shelter from sharks passing overhead. The hollows below my rib cage and at my collarbone make shelter for crabs, who nestle into slumber. The water is still but holding me. I am embraced; close and unsexed, held in a way I feared to hope for.
Far above me, I see the water raging where it meets the air. It is pulled in grasps by a storming wind.
She turns her back to him, holding me in her arms. He batters at her, as she hums into my chest. And finally, I drown
Written October 2024
Cover Image by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
Poem Poetry
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