#summerunderthesea

[verdantvisionsai]

Dive into a world where colors come alive beneath the surface; where the dance of vibrant marine life paints the ocean with hues only nature can create. Let the gentle sway of seaweed and the shimmering scales of fish mesmerize you, inviting you to lose yourself in the beauty of the summer seascape. Embrace the serenity that unfolds in the depths of the ocean, cherishing the wonders that this watery realm holds.

[soncoeurdelion]

Chary

i don’t can’t won’t shan’t trust any of these people here.

you all make me so sick.

[soncoeurdelion]

Abandon

I still remember the vitriol.

Ask him about it, I’d snarled, ask him about it and when he asks you where you heard it from? Tell him you heard it from me. [insert full name]. Tell him I told you and that you heard it from me. I spat it at her, over text, but a direct challenge nonetheless to him.

And I regret it. I would like to say I don’t know what came over me, that I wasn’t in my right state of mind…but even now they all sound disingenuous to me. Even now, I still feel the heat of my rage in that one, pivotal instance.

It makes me immeasurably sad. So, so terribly sad.

It wasn’t jealousy, I say. How can I explain? It’s the loss I fear. The inexorable drawn out separating of two people.

I see my mother and how she’s cut off from so many of the closest friends she had growing up and I think to myself - that’s going to be me. I suppose I can’t blame the girls or the wives-to-be. No one wants an old flame in the lives of their loves, much less an undiscovered flame. Truly, I don’t. I feel like possibly if I were in their position I would do the same or at least I would understand.

But as the self-proclaimed victim in this I can’t help but feel a little cheated. I love these people, you see. So, so very much. And to see them walk away, not by choice but by circumstance, not by forked roads but by the needs and sensitivities of those they’ve decided to hold most dear…I’m at a loss. I can’t blame them! I can’t shake them and say, “don’t pick their demands over this friendship! I need you! I love you!” I can’t do anything but smile and say how happy I am for them! How truly happy I am that they’re happy. Because that’s the love I have for this class of friends: that their happiness is necessarily my happiness.

So walking amongst beauty and listening to beauty fleshed out in words and subtle lilts in tone and knowing absolutely that THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END? I can’t help but feel a little selfish in my interpretation of it all. The smile on my face is the face of practiced, unbridled joy - joy for the joy in another’s life. I feel their ladies’ discomfort in the undertones of their reverent pauses. I am a liability. I am a perceived weakness. I must necessarily be removed. If not immediately then necessarily by a slow, methodical withdrawal.

I feel almost desperate. I’ve always blamed it on having no siblings, the way I cling so desperately onto the friends I make, the way I fashion my whole world out of these people.

And the worst part is there is no way for me to fix this. They won’t give me the chance. They are uncomfortable with my identity and the residual feeling they impute onto my person.

“will I get to meet her?” I ask cautiously. I don’t know why I ask it. I know the answer. It’s a long schpeel of the many different ways we’d objectively get along, perfectly finished off with a topping of silence. In that silence I can hear all the dangerous what-ifs. Because I know that none of those girls are ever, ever going to give me a fair chance. None of them are ever going to want to try. Because I’m female. Because we have a unilaterally imposed history.

I tell myself this is the last hug, the last quiet walk down Woodstock Road, the last cheeky comment from me. Hereinafter I will be expected to be nothing less than civil and nothing more than indifferently friendly. I know it will never satisfy them. Please, I did not ask for this.

[soncoeurdelion]

Daisy

hello mister, pleased to meet you

i just wanted to let you know that i’ve noticed you for quite some time. you sit on the same seat in the train every single morning, always in the same brown oxfords. you're always engrossed, so you probably don’t notice my system of wiping every seat in that carriage with my arse through the week - one for each working day and then musical chairs on weekends. most times you’ve got a book with you. that’s nice, i like books. last week it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. i fancy myself a regular kunderian scholar - we should get coffee some time. this past week it was Midnight’s Children. A marvellous creation there, by all accounts, but i confess, the subtleties of indian politics and the plain facts of indian history escape me. i did not finish it, perhaps you could explain it to me over the coffee that we should get some time. sometimes its the window across that captures your attention. this is the part where i superimpose an image of Matilda onto your person, exuding a kind of innocent but intense concentration. i imagine you trying to lift the windows with your little mind-hands. once, when i was seated at the table across you i “accidentally” tipped my bottle over and carefully watched your face. i can’t say i was disappointed because i didn’t know what to expect. in any case, you did not react. when i’m on the same side of the carriage as you, i try to observe what it is you’re looking at. but the first half of the journey is a slow decay of vegetation and the second half the dizzying flashing of tunnel lights. perhaps the dirt on the glass forms strange patterns. i, too, enjoy variations of cloud-watching. then I try to be introspective but there’s too much life in the train for me to occupy my head with my own. i would ask you what’s on yours, but you might be a bit taken aback. 

coffee?

yours truly,

Daisy

[soncoeurdelion]

she had a curious, hiccuping laugh. it rose slowly to its peak, then like a yawn, recoiled into itself, rebuked.

[soncoeurdelion]

there’s a subtle rash on the underside of my skin. i imagine myself tearing it out and giving it a good scratch before pasting it back in place again. but i know bodies don’t work that way.

i would like to step out of it, wander around like a ghost for a while. feel what it’s like to not feel anything but the stars kissing my spirit.

[soncoeurdelion]

Lamotrigine

you were the perfect crutch, and when i slowed down from sprinting, one by one i felt my limbs slide off like the dead skin of a snake and i thought, did i dream up a race or am i creating the ghost of an old habit? you know that feeling when you’re about to abseil down the side of a tall structure and its face, though featureless, is glaring at you with a fierce hatred, and the ground far below mocking you with its arse in the air? and you can just about feel your centre of gravity shifting over the edge, supported by your toes and the balls of your feet, the sweaty grip of one hand on the railing and the other numb from preparing to let go and grasp the rope instead. at this point your stomach is doing cartwheels in a continuous, confused loop - bracing itself for the sharp drop and then recoiling instinctively when it realises it’s still where it was. and there are lots of people shouting at you, all these voices telling you what to do - but the instructor can’t lower you down until you’re ready to move correctly, and the fools at the bottom can’t see that the 50 yards are really 50 miles. and then time starts to play with itself so that 3 minutes feels like 3 seconds, or 3 hours, or in one millisecond feels like its travelling one way and then going backwards the next that’s me right now. obviously i’m being dramatic, but imagine all that squeezed into the time span between 2 heartbeats and you have a pretty good idea of the kind of paralysing fear or uncertainty, should i say, that i’m routinely subject to. hands are bleeding don’t let go, enemy’s sleeping don’t slit that throat hands are bleeding, i can’t let go - i don’t know how i’m afraid of what comes after. like when you choose to open the door to a stranger and you know there’s no chance of them whipping around and striding out the way they came. you’re looking through the keyhole now but her face is wrapped up in the night i just keep thinking about the feeling, focusing on all this fucking pretentious writing and staying where i am right now. i don’t dare to look elsewhere do you understand what i’m trying to say? is this just narcissism or a poor excuse for inaction?

[soncoeurdelion]

Lamia

somewhere along the way i cursed myself by accident. i think it may have been that time i crushed a ladybug, or perhaps the time i shattered my sister’s mirror, or maybe when i stole my father’s gold and blamed it on another, when i lied to my friends, when i cheated on my lovers-

i list out my sins in the hopes that one day i’ll pinpoint the exact moment it was i condemned myself to this downward spiral, as clichéd as the phrase may sound. but the element of circularity can’t be dispensed with, if this narrative is to be both true and accurate. because that’s all i ever seem to do - go round and round in circles, digging the same trench along the same perfectly curved lines, deeper and deeper into my most unconventional grave. i am driven on and on by a maddening glad-fly i can’t even see, except, in this story, i am all of Hera and Io and fly.

they say if you want to change your life you first have to change yourself. but somewhere between too little and too much there is a piece of the puzzle that is already missing, some bright yet invisible line that has been drawn without my knowing, maybe even a whole series of wrongs linked by some indestructible chain of causation. it is a splinter i would gladly extract, but i simply don’t know how.

so, on my list grows.