The temptation of the sea is always to swallow, but still the city sits kissed by the cerulean waves of this most unruly body. The people know that to enter this planetary hydrosphere is to be devoured, for this water has no sympathy for fleshy fool’s flailing limbs and nothing but contempt for their arrogant voyages into her floriferous womb. So this is not a fishing village, and in the heat of summer when sweat is more plentiful than blood, the locals touch the beach with no more than the tentative stretch of a single toe.
Earth is tired of the narcissistic absorption of herself and here she has delineated clearly the lines of humanity’s most fruitful land bound living.
In this sea-side village of kelp-hair and salty ears, no one can swim.
Sequestered in the salt-brick homes is a pink pillared apartment wherein a girl sleeps. In the summertime she dyes her hair red to match the sky and in winer she lets it fade, slowly, unevenly as the glossy leaves of autumn unevenly red, yellow, and brown. Tonight, as most nights, she is alone. Dreams come, as they always do, without warning or permanence leaving one slightly unsettled, but none-the-less unscathed. She awoke to the smell of smoke, her own half-smoke cigarettes simmering in an ashtray beside her bed, and she coughed (all of it rather unsightly).
The day had already aged with gray hairs showing in the form of afternoon, but she felt no desire to extinguish her smoldering tobacco or put on a shirt. She let incense and laid in bed until the sea-stench of her hair was infused with the odor of burning herbs and cloying loneliness. It was half past three when in disuse, she closed the door to her room and emerged into the dusky atmosphere of December.
She walked past the white-rock homes and pink complexes of her street onto the worn cobble stone path that paved the way to her lovers house. He was not in. He does’t live there anymore. But behind the curtain, in the winter light, she could still see his silhouette. The pain of his absence is a reassurance of her humanity that she sought every afternoon. So she watched. Perhaps it was merely a half hallucinated daydream bought on by insomnia and the psychedelic effects of sea-side living, but reality is not as important as perception. Thoroughly nostalgic and panged with the sorrow of present, she continued onto her daily pilgrimage, stopping only in an abandoned doorway to roll a cigarette.
Across the city a boy too had awakened, hours before mind you, but his accomplishments were parallel. The silhouette of his lover lay tactilely in his bed and he sipped his morning tea in the sublime shadow of her slumbering. Caught in the poverty of living, he headed off to work. The note tucked beneath his doorframe went unnoticed.
Unrequited communication a seething actuality, the girl walked past her make-shift post box near the marketplace with only an unsent letter in her hands. Thrown into the solitary suppositions of silence, she tread on aimlessly and without thought for the destination of her feet. In an alternate doorway she stopped for another cigarette, ignoring the scowls of passing mothers and concerned fathers. Inhale the solace of tar, exhale today’s desolation, the movement of the hand is meditation and tossing is life’s response.
The boy came home and kissed the dark hair and white skin of his most certain love. She kissed him back with amplitude and wailing.
The girl’s cigarette went out. The wind-whipped re-lighting singed only a few of her faded-to-brown hairs. Only the filter remaining, she flicked the ashy corpse onto the beach where her soon-to-be-walking feet would next take her.
Cold sand even cannot be traversed in shoes, so with socks tucked into the heel, she filtered the imperceptible pebbles that grace the barely-land supplicating itself before the water between her toes.
Somnolent entirely, exhausted fully, she laid down on the sand before the sea, wondering if high-tide would lick her out of land into the realm of aquarius severity, to be kissed by the fat fish lips, and held, held in the tender sweetness of kelp.
The boy tossed the note away.
The girl slept.
And the sea saw her.
A short story perhaps, but a poem of imagery
