Salt

There’s salt on my fingertips, and in the seams of my clothes. I can still remember what the beach felt like, that breeze coming off the breakers, a slipstream direct from the sea. When I try to sleep now, all I can hear is the ocean, like my ears are my very own seashell, echoing out into the silence of this winter. Or maybe, that’s just my heartbeat, whooshing past in my ears, a wave of blood, the beat and rhythm. My heart is the sea, a sea within me.
I can deal with that, but what I can’t handle is the salt. I can feel it in the cracks of my skin, the grooves where my curves fade to flesh. The salt is rubbing my memories raw, it’s rubbing away the things I want to keep close to my heart. Salt fills the cavities inside my eyes where I used to see the sun. Instead of tan, all I have is salt in my pores. I am yesterday’s salt pan, drying out and cracking into a million pieces of whiteness. I should lick myself up, stick my bones together with saliva, before I fall apart. I might be Lot’s wife, collapsing in on myself, a badly built pillar of humanity, all because I looked back on the past, over my shoulder into that tropical sunset.
What I want is that slipstream from the sea to pick me straight up on a breeze, and remake me somewhere near where the waves crash constant on a sandy shore. I’ll still be made of salt then, but that salt won’t scratch my skin to nothing as it laments its distance from the ocean. Instead that salt will drag my heart out of stupor, and bring it to a beat that matches the wave’s rhythm. With every pulse in my chest the salt will trickle out from corners of my anatomy I don’t have names for. Down the gentle rise of my knuckles and into the sand, that salt, which is half of me and half the sea, mixed with blood and summer memories, will make it’s way back to those murky depths.
There’s salt on my fingertips, and in the seams of my clothes. There’s salt in my hair, and in the corners of my eyes. There’s salt on my skin, and under it. There’s salt in the sea, and that sea is in me.