Adrift

I feel the warmth, the gentle probing of his hands along the small of my back, the caress of his fingertips painting lazy eights along my legs.

Legs?!

I forget myself when I fall asleep on land.

The shock of legs slowly evaporates as sunlight nudges my eyelids. Dozing, drifting happily, I smell his life in our billowy sheets. His scent is better than toast and coffee. He smells like a splash of rain, or sweat clinging to his torso after a ten-mile jaunt. He tastes of spearmint breath and I am comforted.

He laughs, drinks me in, kisses my freckled gams, nuzzles my toes, makes me delirious about the choices I've made. Choices I've made for him.

His whisper warms my ear, "Wake up. Wake up, Love. You're drowning. Wake up!"

Coming to, I avert my gaze from his side of our waterbed and swallow my scream. His pillow holds my hand. His absence is a newness I can't embrace.

The sea, my nemesis, has claimed him once more. He believes, "There isn't that much ocean between Boston and St. Johns."

But I can't breathe. The air assaults my lungs. I need water. Salt water.

I want to tunnel to the earth's crust and dig my way through to the sea's heavily wet underbelly. I want to reclaim my shelf. I need to slip away from all this oxygen to find my old form, twirling swirls of azure, dancing with dolphins in the bubbly blue.

I'm so over humanity.

In another life I am an underwater archeologist, the discoverer of an unfathomable world, the conquerer of great depths. I could discover Atlantas, or myself.

In this life I am but a mermaid dreamer wonderer frolicking in the deep. Chasing my tail.

I gave up that life in the wild blue yonder, and my saltier self, my scales and sense of justice. For him.

*

I am never where the sea carries him. She keeps him from me, adrift. Her stomach swells and writhes, great bellydancer. She is seven deadly veils half-swallowed by seven Chinese brothers. Her essence stretches shore to shore. She draws him under, her arms breaking into rolls of fog and foam. She seduces.

I, too, ache with want of her command.

He is all I see when I close my eyes.

"Bon voyage," I say. My words mist his mirror. He's long gone, voyaging to her heart, and well beyond my landlocked grasp.

How the sea haunts me.

She gives him what I cannot.

It's no mystery, why he left me. I am anchored now. Tethered to his castle by the sea.

*

I slide on his Great Big Sea t-shirt and listen to tunes to drown out the sea shells ringing in my ears.

These four walls stifle my creativity. I can't write. It's lonely business, imagining words to paint worlds. Maybe I'm too close to a blank canvas. Or maybe I'm just chasing tales again.

He knows I cannot return to her, but he can. And so he does.

I cannot fault him. I married a man who married the sea.

***

Copyright © 07/16/2021 by Christy Munson. All rights reserved.