Rubedo Coast

A dark coast of amber waves, a wriggling field of moon-suffused wine, licked my toes like an entity desperate for the taste of someone else’s salt. Water split across my tendons like a sigh, and my heels sank with a soft pull. Rough, living bodies recoiled when I flexed either arch. Sand crumbled and fell—a victim of physics I don’t need to understand.

The starless night spread hard into infinity beyond the lapping waves, the lazy and hypnotic tides. A silver aura bloomed from a smooth egg suspended above the horizon. Though the body rotated at an imperceptible level, its mighty wind whipped the beach in arrhythmic order; reception arrived at the intuitive level before the physical, and my body oscillated between savoring and lamenting the feeling of cool, salt-stung air.

When I finished rocking, the stagnancy of empty air ached me. My bare chest yearned for its next invisible lashing. With every wet raspberry the wind carried with it, the cage of moldering organs rattled in shock. Sea spray dotted my stomach and diffused above my solar plexus. My neck remained dry.

It was my bare chest, jealous of my succumbed feet, who beckoned me to crouch.

I obliged with a clumsy drop. My knees plunged into the shallow water, and a cold rush stole any pleasure I could’ve garnered from the task. I shuddered as the chill from my bare genitals closed in on my tightening spine.

One, long breath swept the floor and tidied the space in my lungs to welcome the next. I sequestered each moment into their own apartment–every sensation a roommate to another before an exhale severed the floor plan to build another condo. Misplaced feelings hid behind doorless walls, abandoned and starved of the ambrosia of acknowledgment.

My flesh adjusted to the cold, yet never received the associated warmth of integration. The neutrality of it all frayed my edges more than the whelm of total experience.

I genuflected to the egg—another slow fall—and closed my eyes to swallow the impossible salt and listen to the ceaseless static.

If I opened my eyes, I’d witness a depth to the beach. I could outstretch my hand and overturn shells with ease, even pocket them for later admiration. The new ability to negotiate farther and further appealed to my wanderlust sensibilities.

If I opened my eyes, I’d suffer the wrath of nature’s denial for my kind to thieve such wonder. I feared the ocean salt would sear my eyes into blackened raisins and cauterize the wound. If I couldn’t see the silver moon transform into the golden sun, the dream would continue as an endless circuit; only a start, with no resolution.

Could a morning’s warmth penetrate the saline armor coating my skin?

Without sight, I could imagine a chalk-dusted blackboard, scored with faded algorithms and illegible text. It seemed a pointless endeavor to decode such ghosts—it is the one field containing the sum of all, and my listless mind could hardly fathom my own limbs. In the pit of my false sight, a thrumming bruise reactive to light.

Flashes of peach and plum stained the back of my eyes when I raised my head from the dark pool. Lashes stapled my eyelids, and loose snot tattooed my upper lip. A gasp, like a copper bell, carried across the now lavender ocean to collide with the messy easel raised over the coastline.

I stood upright with the debris-laden ocean tightening around the well of my throat. Any farther, and a black initiation would allow me to explore the ocean for its finer artifacts—shells and doubloons alike—with no need for sun on my flesh or air in my lungs.

The largest of my toes anchored into loosening sand. I pitched a glance behind me to inspect the shore; beyond the sycamores laid a black screen and a tunnel of stars, each one another flickering distraction. Before me, the twinkling ocean. The sun, a radiant face, promised to breathe warmth into the water. It spoke a crystalline language encoded with the promise I’d never feel cold again. It promised I’d never lose my sight, so long as I braved one more step.