We Are The Sea

‘We are the sea,’ she used to say to him as they would sit on the beach at sunrise or sunset and listen to the waves, or the bird calls, or both. And just as the world was spinning he would wrap his arms around her and feel like a treasure hunter pulling a relic from underneath the layers of their existence. She was an antique human, not born of this world. She never belonged here and walked through her relationships almost as an alien, ultimately foreign. But she certainly had a way with her words.

“We are the sea,” she said, and he used to think it was something about the nature of the place. So vast and impossible to consider. People were those immense waters and all the mysteries within them. But the more he thought the deeper those simple words seemed until he was diving down into the depths and places he’d never been before. We are the sea was not just the thing, those waters covering this tiny little globe in a mass, teeming with life. We are the sea was like words were an ocean we dig our fingers into, deep and unknown, pulling out a net full of adjectives to paint pictures of our lives, always in comparison to that shore line, that horizon. Our catch, wriggling in ink stains and whispers on the deck of some ship, or on the planks of a jetty, bleeds truth and it dripped away back into the salty depths of the water. We try to hold this in the palms of our hands but we can’t. It follows the contours of our fingers back to where it belongs. Everything goes back to the sea.

We are the sea as it is violently angry and raging, crashing, dragging everything to the bottom and hiding it there. Stowing it away like a child hides meaningless treasures in the sand pit to be forgotten. Shipwrecks are our secrets buried deep below, between reefs and eventually they become them. Soon, they’ll be a mere memory that we hold inside us, but never let anybody see. The sand in grains of time, seconds slipping by, fills the gaps in our masks until even we feel whole. Then one day someone will dive into those depths to shine a light where never there has been one before and our secrets will be laid bare for them, skeleton and naked against the bottom of the abyss, and they’ll know it all. But even then there are some things the sea hides, down where no light can shine. This is where we keep our truths.

We are the sea as the sea is perfectly destructive. Taking something it has made, or something we were foolish enough to place within it’s grasp and annihilating it. Wood chips mix with grains of sand and the coloured flecks where paint was and everything washes up on the shore line, broken and waiting to be rescued. Beach combers come past and judge it, taking what they want and leaving everything else behind. Those beach side havens are levelled by a kind of power we are only barely aware of inside us. These storms are our mood swings, our unhappiness, our feeling that nothing we do is really worth keeping forever. So we’ll knock it all down like a challenge. Show me what else you can build.

We are the sea as the sea is a mirror reflecting space back onto itself. The patterns in the tide splash ripples on the clouds and the water thinks it sees itself among the stars. A shining copy, glistening under the clouded orb of the moon. This mirror is what we see in everyone else. That spark we mistake for something meaningful, the sparks we miss against the explosions of our own humanity. These reflections are the light we see in other people’s eyes, the light that dies as time plants darkness in its place. So we’ll take whatever we can get, even second hand light and we’ll throw it out there for whoever is watching, making our star light wishes on it finding its way home. We all just want to go home.

We are the sea as the sea is calm. Like a cradle for the continents, rocking them into slumber and shushing their nightmares. Tomorrow might be the end of that feeling, but for now there is a balance, and now is enough. That calm is our midnights. Our seconds before sleeping when we’re floating on our own hallucinations of exhaustion. That calm is the sleepy paralysis we’d worry about if we weren’t so damn comfortable, bobbing on the tops of our bed covers and listening to the ebb and flow of our heart beats. That calm is our silent sunsets and frosted dawns. It is the feeling that drags us through it all and washes us up on the other side, cast aways in a reality we don’t understand. The waves lapping the shore wakes us into some new land, but inside we’re still that ocean, and the ocean always remains. We are the sea.