Ocean

I never expected to live near you, to wake with your breath of kelp and wind in my nose, to cross the highway at dawn to stand ankle deep in the epp and flow of your tide. You remind me, on those mornings, what a greedy b***h you really are. The rip tide that pulls the sand from beneath my heels pulled the prom queen to the horizon last week. It was in the paper that sits and fades on my doorstep. I, however, am more concerned that you steal shells from my fingertips. Do my jars of clam shells mean so much to you, that you thought a girl who dances the way I used to dance was a fair trade?
She was yours anyways, you know. You do that to people, get the pull of your tide in their pulse. Us women are particularly susceptible, because in the early dawn you pull the blood from our bodies to stain slumbering thighs and white sheets. You would have had her. She�d live on your shore, like I do. Live for you. Like I do. She�d come everyday to the waves to stand against your strength as long as she could, only dragging herself to the safety of sand when she was shivering and shaking, tossed and touseled with throat and eyes raw from salt, hair matted and knotted, weak legs and wounds burning and healing. She would wake to salt gluing her eyelashes together. She would walk through narrow streets silently, stepping between white washed houses battered and worn from the winds. She would eat too little and sleep even less, trapped in a house with so many windows always alive and full of the scent and sounds of the sea, the harsh paler-than-white light of sun moon cascading over white walls and floors and furniture and skin. She would be a faded girl, all salt-curled fine hair that breaks easily and scoured skin that peels like paint on the store fronts, washed out and seeping salt and sighs. She would have jars of shells she would count daily, like they could buy her soul back. She would have jars of shells on her shelves and seaweed in her hair.

Just like me.

Reviews

[Claude]

Beautiful sensory details! You captured what I try to...our relationship with the ocean. It parallels our lives with ups-and-downs, storms, and periods of calm.
Well done!