Saltwater Kisses

At night, I dream of an ocean with no end in sight. It's a subconscious callback to my childhood, I'm sure, when all I wanted to do was dunk my head beneath the waves and pretend I was in another universe. In that other world, I could submerge myself among the shells and algae, the tide-run sand just out of reach below my floating feet.

The dream reality had been born from summer months down at my grandparents' seaside home, where the stickiness of melting cherry popsicles was as familiar to me as the feel of water against my skin. I don't even remember wearing real clothes during those summers, living out my entire existence in salt-stained bathing suits. I remember my grandmother's smile, telling me what a silly thing I was, while my grandfather goaded me to come aboard his little fishing boat just to see what we could catch off the coast.

But then the memories grow fainter and less idealistic. My mom got out of rehab for what felt like the billionth time, and the rides down to the beach house became more fraught with tension and anger, like a rubber band waiting to snap. I remember my grandmother raising her voice for the first time when she found a bottle of vodka in my mother's room. My grandfather would just shake his head and retreat back out to the boat that would dot the lonely horizon till near sunset each day.

Soon enough the trips down to the ocean stopped. My mother moved us around a few times until my grandparents couldn't find us and ruin what my mother viewed as her chance at "getting things right." But the nights of cooking Hamburger Helper or grilled cheese soon bled into pizza boxes with a side of vodka on ice. I tried not to make her angry—anything but that—even though my most soothing voice could still provoke something flying right by my head. And the revolving door of boyfriends taking the living room couch made me learn from an early age to lock my bedroom door at night.

School should have been a sanctuary, but it wasn't. I was always the awkward, gangly girl with the wiry hair, too odd to go unnoticed but too abnormal to befriend. My only reprieve came from the fact that my school had a swimming pool; I spent a few semesters on the swim team, wasting hours just doing laps to the other end of the pool and back. It was never for sport, always for fun, as mind-boggling as that was to the coach, who said I was "wasting" my potential. But like many things in my life, I tried to ignore what was expected of me.

As soon as age eighteen hit, I was out of the rundown house I shared with my mother. I found a job bartending in Florida while I aimed to take the steps to become a scuba diving instructor. And, still ashamed of my mother, I didn't even try to track down my grandparents or the lovely little beach house from my memories.

But by nightfall, when I am safe in the apartment I share with two other roommates, I step back into that time when I was happiest. The sand crunches beneath my feet as I walk, edging deeper and deeper, past the shallows and the safety of the shore. It is so vibrant that I can almost taste the salt on my tongue, as if the water is a lover that embraces me like no other human has ever done. Steeped in the ocean, I let my arms and legs sway, a marionette without strings, only thinking of how protected the sea has always made me feel.

I am the little mermaid in reverse—trapped on land, longing to trade my legs for fins, willing to give up everything I know for the promise of the water. The closest thing to living that life is to traverse the ocean while I am outfitted in gear that will allow me to reside there in doses. It is the only kind of magic I've ever known.

And when I resurface, the longing is still there, never fading, whether it be by the hands of my dream or the training I undergo in the waking world. I imagine the water sloshes at my feet to beckon me closer, seduce me into walking into its depths with no return. But I'm still too afraid because my human skin and organs are no match for the ocean. I'm no sea creature capable of surviving with the sea as my forever abode. And then I feel so strange for envying the octopus, the starfish, the jellyfish—all those beings who are living just the life I can only have in dreams.

I never tell anyone of my obsession with the water. No one can understand how it is my safe place, the one I can always retreat to when nothing else can make the noise in my brain subside. Even sitting in a bathtub, my head plunged beneath the surface, I imagine I can hear the water singing to me the lullabies I always craved as a child. And behind my closed eyes I see the beach house, my grandmother's footprints in the sand, the small boat my grandfather loved, the sun dipping just below the horizon as I watched from the shore.

The water lulls me into a peace that I can find nowhere else, no matter how I try, and for once something like happiness blooms inside my chest. I feel as if I am a coral reef coming back alive after being left to wilt.

But then it's back to reality, drying myself off from the bath or the shower or the pool or the ocean, because that's what humans do—and that's what I must, by extension, also do.

The only lingering effect comes from the ocean with its salt against my parted lips. And perhaps that is enough.