you cannot drown my salt-choked soul
i'll float amid this blackened sea
the deepest dark against my back
above me: fire endlessly
I do not face the sea.
It calls to me; it beckons. The waves are whispering a language I have only just learned; my body yearns for it and, in that yearning (somewhere in the pause, in the breath) my heart begins to break.
My back is to the waves. My back is to the bright, clear spring day.
I stand facing away from the sea. I stand facing the trees of the forest where the coastline ruts up against Terrastella’s shoreline.
I do not face the sea, because the first life I have ever ended to live lays behind me in the wake.
I can still taste the blood on my mouth. I brought it to shore because I could not stand the squelching beneath the surface; the way everything had been fluid, water and blood. I was breathing what I consumed. My gills fluttered with salt-sea and copper-blood and it had been too much.
Too much. That is the only way to describe the complicated feelings that well within me. Everything is too much. The corpse is unrecognizable, now. Bits of bone and flesh and organ strewn out in the pinkish surf.
My stomach is full, and I do not feel weak.
(Then why, I wonder, do I still feel so unlike myself?)
I close my eyes and let the sun bathe me, cleanse me. There is blood on my mouth.
(There is blood on my mouth, but I do not want to clean it).
The scars on my throat, new and pink, must look like a necklace of pearls in this light.
When I turn back toward the sea, Damascus is flying overhead. I wonder if I ought plunge back into the depths. Instinct says yes, yes, yes—there is an urge, insatiable, that says I must. And somehow I refrain.
Ironically, the water has already dragged the corpse away.
Perhaps that is a small blessing.
A small mercy.
I don’t know, anymore.
