I feel like it's been a while since I was this deep in the ocean, but time doesn't have much of a meaning here, so maybe that's an illusion of brain chemistry. Or maybe that's what time is.
Either way. I digress.

I'm deep in the waves and it's horrifying and comforting like it always is. It always feels the same, like giving up and going home at the same time.

The waves taste never taste like salt water. They taste like unresolved fights and loss and every disappointment I was ever made to swallow.

Maybe I am a bird, maybe like Jenny, God or whoever or whatever heard my prayers and gave me wings so I could fly far far away. But it isn't a permanent gift. They wear out, like a metaphor made of wax, and I fall back down and my feathers become scales to weigh out my failures every time.

Maybe it is partially because I suspect that this is the only thing I've ever really loved. Not me. Not a chimera in my dreams that wears a dozen, a hundred different faces reminding me of what I once had or could have had, if only I were better or stronger. The depth and madness and the way the sound echoes in the waves from all the ways I have been transformed into something rich and strange.

I wonder how it feels to be fit for a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, to have one place in your life where you didn't feel like you were walking on knives. To be able to chose that pain instead of it just being the reality.

I know I'll not live rolling in the undertow forever. I know I'll rise like bubbles to the foam and reflected sunshine again. But for now I'll close my eyes in the deep and dark and pretend the salt water I feel on my face is the spray of the sea.