Don't Swim Tonight, My Love

Cold wind whips through my clothes like a pin-ridden lash as though I stand naked on this desolate beach. I wouldn’t notice if I was. I could hardly think of anything so abstract as my body with this horrible sight before me; the dark and vast ocean fusing with the unlit sky into an abyss, threatening to swallow me whole without thought or struggle. Eroded by the wind and sea spray, my body is dissolving. I am no longer a person. I am more vulnerable than even a newborn baby, who has a mouth with which to sob - I am nothing more than eyes, a helpless gaze fixed on the beast about to bite down, blinded by the claustrophobic darkness, an iron coffin around me. I am still helpless while I watch her body began to float across my vision, a blurry white cavity carved from the black. 

—

In the womb, the fluid sounds like a vast ocean. You are borderless within it: you are dissolved into something made infinite by its containment. The liquid is all you know and that little bit of nothing becomes everything. At some point, the ocean pours out from under us, leaves nurse-like light and air to pummel us into these suddenly-formed bodies, still mostly water. But I never really left the ocean, nor it me. I heard it in my sleep. My mother called it a nightmare. It was not a dream at all. On rare nights, flashes of monsters and pretty girls would flit across my eyes, and I would briefly find myself lost to dream. Most nights, though, I slept and found only the darkness of my eyes, indistinguishable from the ocean, and that cool, deafening rush of waves, some primordial beast cooing lullabies and warnings into my ears. I heard the plucking of Indra’s Net, that infinite and all-encompassing spiderweb of space, something calling me home to a land I didn’t remember or recognize. I woke shaking as though my own delicate body had been plunged into its icy depths. 

Whatever enveloped me when I slept never loosened its grip on me. Not long after my thirteenth birthday, I had a rare dream: staring down into the canyon of adulthood, I saw the ocean, dark and deep, in the shadows that swallowed the bottom. I knew I would never leave it behind. This was not some childhood fixation but a condition of my life. I woke and taught myself to calm my frenzied face. I stopped complaining about the sound. I slept with my window open, so I could tell myself I was just hearing the lapping waves that bordered our tiny town, but no matter how many miles away we traveled or how many pillows I held over my ears, the sound never got quieter, never changed at all. 

My mother laughed at my fear of the ocean and told me how, on childhood beach days, she had to cross the bones of her soft arms against my tiny ribs to restrain me from eagerly running straight into the water. I do remember the pain in my underarms from her picking me up and pulling me away over and over again as the water encircled my legs, the two of us putting on Sisyphus’s play in miniature. I also remember the firm grip of invisible, icy hands around my ankles, my mother’s voice drowned out by the water in my head as it frothed in a frenzied rush, that mysteriously strong current trying to lead me directly to the lowest pocket of the seafloor. When I could speak, she was baffled by my insistent refusal of the beach. 

—

The woman walks across my vision so gently, her white dress blessedly splitting ocean and sky in two. She moves in a familiar pattern. The sand swallows my feet while I cross the beach in a daze. Her delicate footprints look terribly natural next to my own. A cold fear fills my body as though the dark water has already seeped into my stomach, slowing me while I try to run - she is no longer walking across the beach but turning into the water. Her footprints are growing shallower and more abstract, light imprints crowned by popping seafoam, the mere suggestions of her time here, erased by tiny waves. The dark, dim water is beginning to erase her legs. She wanders further, the dark water dissolving her below her thighs, then higher, higher. I wish I had a mouth so I could call to her. Inch by inch, more of her is becoming invisible. It’s swallowing her up, I find myself thinking, It’s punishing her for splitting it back into two. I slip my shoes off and wince at the slippery sand like a block of ice below my feet. 

—

On one acrid July afternoon in my late teens, my tongue melting in my mouth and sweat pooling on my scalp, I allowed myself to follow my family to a small beach. Two cliffs on either side stretched over the beach like a giant, round archway, kissing gently, forming a thin bridge over the line where water met sand. People crawled lazily across the sand, through the tide pools, over the rocks, their relaxed mumbling rendered unintelligible by the ocean static. I don’t know if I was the first one to see the man. All the world went dead and dumb to me when I did. He stood swaying at the point where the two cliffs met. Nobody looked until they heard the splash, which sparked waves of silence and panicked whispers that built into a rushing din, aftershocks of noise following the first eruption that welcomed him into the sea. Someone fell, what, someone fell into the water, who can swim, has he come back up yet? 

Nobody but me saw him before the splash. Nobody but me knows how he drew himself up and stopped swaying, how he stood, stock still, and lifted one calm foot over the edge and then another, taking calm, decisive steps, how his gaze fixed firmly ahead on the line where the water hit the sky in a hazy blue orgy of mist and cloud. How he fell without moving, like a rag doll, until the sight of him was replaced by a crown of water rising over his body. How the waves swirled hungrily over his body, crashing into each other in their excitement like hungry dogs with full mouths, spray like spit. I stood still on the beach while bodies rushed to his, ants building a bridge across the water. I neither watched nor followed as they pulled him from the water, only stared at the waves eddying in his absence, my back to the crowd.

I found him at the hospital a few days later. The waves had been crashing in my dreams to the pattern I’d heard when they swallowed him: the noise distracted me. I didn’t listen, I didn’t speak. I found my uncertain way to the small hospital, shoes near-melting on the endless sidewalk while seagulls dove overhead in chaotic bursts. I found my way in, quietly asked for him at reception, the man who fell, I found something of his on the beach. I prayed they wouldn’t ask what and they didn’t, only led me to the cool, dark hospital room, smelling of antiseptic and bleach, so far removed from the curdled seaweed and cooked carcasses of birds and fish under the seaside sun. He laid in the bed like a non-being, taking up the whole room. His body was held in white gauze, casts, and cords, the strict supplements forcing him into the shape of a human, which his eyes, half-closed and unfocused, told me he had long ago ceased to be. I was not sure if I was speaking to him. If I was, I could not hear my own voice over the ocean rushing in my head, a sound I knew we shared. 

“He fell onto the rocks,” came a cool voice, so clear, cutting through the rushing water like a ship. I looked up to find a young woman sat in the corner of the dark room like a gargoyle, guarding the body, holding me in her gaze. “They’re insidious. The water looks so still over them, but once you fall through…” Her irises were nearly black, swallowing up her pupils, her eyes deep pools in a soft, expressionless face. A cloud of curls floated around her head like seafoam yet to evaporate. She stared at me serenely over the still man who acknowledged nothing beyond his own mind (or whatever had overcome it). “I know,” I replied, my voice awkward as though never used before, all flat vowels and angular consonants, “I saw.” I’d never heard myself so clearly. She nodded again. Our gaze was a taut string. I could not move. I did not notice the third guest, only felt him brush by me as he knelt by the bed. She lowered her eyes to him and I followed suit. The guest, another man as ordinary as the first, knelt with reverence, delicately brushed the man’s hair from his face, dappled his temples and brow with cold water, murmured low consolations and questions. I wondered if I had ever seen a man treat another so tenderly. Dark blues and purples flooded the swimmer’s skin where it poked out between bandages. Suddenly, I began to wonder why I had come here.

The man looked questioningly at me and then at the girl. “A friend of mine from school,” she murmured, patting the gray chair beside her with a pointed look. He nodded, rededicated himself to his devotion without another thought. Uncertainly, I sat beside her. She nodded gratefully, took my hand. I could not remember seeing her ever before, but I couldn’t remember a life without knowing her, either. Something in her spoke to me. Her hand was icy cold on mine, a joy even in the air-conditioned room. 

The man was her uncle, she told me, and he lived with the man who attended him. She had come from further inland to care for him after the incident. She had fond memories of the beach that had eaten him, a sentimental spot where he used to take her during summers she spent at their house. She had not returned in some time. I guessed that the rest of her family disliked something about the man her uncle had become in this coastal town, the way he lived. There was some element of rebellion to her coastal pilgrimage. She had been sending him letters. He returned them with love and questions about the family who no longer spoke to him. She slipped me the information in quiet, infrequent murmurs. Neither man before us reacted in the slightest while she laid their story bare before me. I took it in without response. She knew to continue. 

The hospital was a timeless place, the hallway fluorescence unwavering but respectfully leaving the room unlit. Eventually, she squeezed my palm. Her hand never warmed, though it stayed attached to mine by the sticky residue of my summer heat. “It was good of you to come,” she said. “But you should go sleep now.” I nodded, swallowed dumbly. I found nighttime waiting outside. 

The next day, I walked the same route. I introduced myself at reception as a friend of the family. I found my bedside chair empty and her waiting beside it. We spent the rest of summer in that quiet, dark, room, watching the dark pools of blood below his skin grow lighter, absorb back into his body, watching him shed bandages like he was hatching with painstaking slowness from some great cocoon. His eyes never focused. He never replied to the other man’s calm promises, but once his head and neck were freed from their wraps, he tilted his head to angle his face at him, all he could offer. The other accepted this with solemn sweetness.  

Over the months, the wind cooled and picked up around us, shaking walls and howling through windows. The beginnings of winter fog formed a tunnel between school and hospital as I began my final year. A year older than me, she stayed by his side. It was hard to imagine her outside of that small gray chair, her skin unbleached by the chaste hospital lights. Eventually, he was discharged. I arrived one day and found only sunlight and fluorescence mixing in the empty room like bleach and ammonia. 

That night, like usual, I laid down and felt the rush of descent, the night closing in around me as I sank into a sea with no floor - but for the first time in a long time, I fell through the sea into a dream, a plain, white space like a hospital room. She met me there. I dreamt that the pools in her eyes finally flooded, the water streaming down her face, the dream filling with saltwater. I woke still, calm. The crashing waves continued to murmur through my window. The night seeped in. I slipped on shoes and a coat and crept outside. Airborne salt crystallized on my face and tongue. In the silent town, fully dead at this time of night, the noise of waves roared down every street. Hardly more than half awake, I found myself wandering stupidly to the beach, my face trained on the ground as though it were made of lead.

When I saw sand begin to cover the sidewalk and realized where my sleeping feet had taken me, my body tingled with a current of electric fear. Tendrils of cold mist solidified around my hands - she came to me through the fog, her breath warm on my face. She hugged me tightly and led me down to the water. I never looked up, only followed her stupidly and froze before the water, staring down at the low tongues lapping at the salty rock and my shoes. Fear turned my body to fragile ice. I’d never been so close to the ocean without the light of day or a crowd to insulate me.

“Look up,” she whispered, her voice almost lost in the wind. I shook my head. She reached out, tilted my chin up. I choked on my breath. 

“Where’s the ocean?” I asked, embarrassed, but I saw only blank dissolution before us, endless fog stretching into the night. I could hardly make out the cliffs overhead.

“It’s always there,” she said, “but you don’t always have to see it.” The warmth of her breath on my neck was melting me into something human again. The side of her body met mine. Her arm circled my waist as she leaned into me. We were each half-protected from the biting wind, listened to it howl over the empty plain hidden before us.

“Will I see you again?” I didn’t want to ask it. I didn’t want her answer. Only shells of words fell from my mouth. She stared straight ahead. 

“I got a letter,” she said, pressing her lips tight into a thin line. “From my parents. They don’t want me back.” Tiny rivers fell down her cheeks. “I have nowhere else to go.” 

I pulled her into me, wrapped my arms around her. Her tears fell hot on my chest, then cooled, magnets for the icy wind. I wished I could swallow her like the ocean, make myself her home. Just before the fog could dissipate with dawn, she finally tore from my chest, pressed her lips softly to mine, and walked wordlessly away. I slipped into bed just as the sun rose, my mouth a furnace, the rest of my body anesthetized by the cold. 

—

Last night, I had the dream again. Her hands were painful gauntlets of ice closing around my wrists. I held her close. When her tears flooded to the levels of our mouths, I parted my lips and breathed in, long and deep, letting the water fill me. Again, I woke calm in the small hours of the morning, and arrived here, at this beach, with neither her warm body nor the shield of fog to protect me. She appeared just as I began to lose myself.

—

The water is biting into my ankles now, quickly numbing them. It is all I can do not to fall. The sand grows as I walk, expanding into jagged rocks that the retreating waves drive into the backs of my heels, pushing and pulling me in. The cliff-formed bridge passes overhead. I have entered the sea. Jagged rocks pierce the ground, strangely slippery as I strike them with my feet, trying to climb forward, feeling no pain. She is far ahead, the water closing around her chest, holding her hands down. Small waves crash over her head. Her cloud of hair deliquesces into the sea, running down her neck and shoulders. Slowly, even her head slips below the surface. I have nothing to follow but bubbles bursting as quickly as they run from her lungs. 

What else am I to do? Live the rest of my life looking away, waiting for cloud covered nights, chasing fog down the coast and through the forests only for it to evaporate in the morning? Fall alone into the canyon of inky adulthood? I’ll regress into the ocean, dissolve into the womb of the world, the place before spirits become human, and hold her forever. 

My legs are becoming numb and uncontrollable - now my hands, my chest, my neck, sedated by the stinging sea. I trust it to carry me when I can not carry myself. I relinquish my body piece by piece. My hair trails behind me like torn kelp. Step after step, I follow her trail of bubbles into the center of the ocean. Neither moon nor stars watch us disappear into the abyss as it becomes one again with the sky.