sessile

I woke up with salt still drying in my hair. The sky threatened rain, leaving the air humid and my skin sticky. I felt sand trapped under my nails and the discomfort of damp sheets around my body. Yet I lay there, prolonging the return to consciousness and delaying the gust of grief brought in with the new day. Mourning that the sea had not taken me. 

Sometimes, on days like these, I pretend the air I breathe is water and I imagine where the ocean brings me. Each inhale takes me further from home and each exhale brings me back. So I inhale more and exhale less until my lungs burn and the recounts of the night prior flood my mind. 

There is a truth amongst those who are willing to drown. We are the ones who believe the old legends. We are the ones who know how to escape through the salt portal. We are the ones who drink the ocean until our body rejects it, and we keep drinking until the water shows us the way. I am the one who tries. I am the one who is stuck. 

I keep asking the sea to drown me but it won’t listen. It keeps bringing up me for air and dragging me to shore. You’re not listening, I plead, take me somewhere new. But the sea always returns me. Some days I lay buoyant and let the salt hold me as I get rained on, either by the sky or my own eyes. Both sting. I wish the sea could tell the difference.

The salt still clung to my hair when I returned to the ocean. The clouds had opened and released rain. My mind had submitted and released tears. I am sessile, I admitted, filtering the same water through my body. The same thoughts. The same words. The same desires. The same beliefs. I am sessile, I accepted, and must filter what moves me to be brought somewhere new.