“I’m scared of the ocean.” I said, looking mostly into darkness at the irony of a glowing cherry bobbing through space. She walked closer to me and gruffly plucked the cigarette out of her own mouth and blew down.
“You’re a pussy is what you’re telling me.”
“I’m not a pussy! The ocean’s God!”
She stuck the nub of her cigarette back into her lips and untied her shoes, almost falling over in the sand. Here from years of change. I had no evidence that the ‘what goes around, comes around’ concept of karma actually existed, but in birth in birth-and -death, you find sand. Sand is the result of broken down stone. Same as cliffs eaten by the salted teeth of waves. Eventually sand would die, to be born a different sediment, hardened, back into stone—the resurrection. Everything on earth works by itself. It feeds itself. It recycles itself. It shifts it’s contents into perfect balance, one wave at a time. Animals like us would evolve eventually to gaze not at the navel but into the womb.
She was running down the beach now, just past the line drawn where the tide would crawl up. I watched her walk in, towards the horizon, where I stopped to stare at what wanted to be a reflection of the moon over the water. It’s light rippling over, the way T.V. static moves, waves plucking their heads up to catch coast, breaking in series, whiter and larger, emerging from each other, multiplying like cells, dying on impact.
I untied my shoes just to barely let what I expect to be freezing cold water by September under my toes. It’s warm—it’s easy. I feel myself anchoring in even as waves eat sand out from under my feet, the shape left, smeared like oil pastel of a print.
Looking out again, a girl turned, smiling my direction, letting waves beat at her legs. I smiled, feeling salted air across my face, peeling away pretense.
I’d once read that looking at the horizon was a dopamine release, physiologically proven now, not just a natural fact from the experience of crushing absolutely all remnants of the urban perspective through sight alone, that a life alone might be 100 years, outlived by some tortoises—outlived by all roaches. Our problems are small—the mind makes itself bigger. But we’ve built cities as replacements in hopes we might feel the same. Those cities filled with readers interested in the incentive of looking at a horizon. The opportunities we have to debunk every natural wonder in hopes of it revealing its truth, so that later we can bottle the feeling. So that later we can sell it back to you.
I stared, straight on, at the hard line. The details blurring, into murky midnight blues. The rushing feeling of the sound of waves filling you. In sequence, surrounding, one ripple after another, the hands of wind sounding out, like one long breath. I don’t swim, all life comes from the sea—the sea is God, he giveth, he taketh away.
___
This piece of fiction was originally published in the now extinct Metazen.
