#39: To Become the Sea

things the full moon told me to write

The tension between a writer and a blank page is insurmountable sometimes. So she pours her heart into her work, the kind that puts food on the table, and even as she writes this she feels how little everyone must think she does. Get up in the morning and paint, like it’s a real job. Put food on the table, she says, like she can cook any of it after.

She Googles the word ‘self-invalidation’ and finds a kind of belonging ringing from each word on the webpage. It’s both mortifying and soothing, like there is a name for the claws eating into her skin for the past couple of years. There was a time she used to take things seriously, like her craft and her words, and look at them with a microscope to use only what was necessary and cut away everything else. Like that thing Michelangelo said about carving David or something. It feels like a different girl, a different body then. The scars have been deep and the new muscles that grow in their place still sore to the touch. This new body has only just been formed. What a thing it is, to be born every few weeks and then die again, no? Even so, the hints of mastery pop up here and there - her fist is full of eagles, and she hold them like they were born there. She goes to work and tames the ocean, tells it when to rise and when to fade - she plays conductor for an opera of her own. Surely this must be something valuable. At some point she’ll find it.

Her friends check in on her every now and then - they know she’s bad at asking for help. They still stick around, and it puts ice to her nerves - numbs them off but somewhere she knows trusting people was once an easy thing to do.

She stays up at night, stalking people from past lives, and the resentment bubbles up in her bloodstream till there’s foam in her mouth. She is so angry at all the wholeness she gave away willingly to girls and boys who didn’t deserve an eyelash of her. She is furious with herself, with boundaries, the lack thereof, she wants to become the sea. She reads books she got from someone whom she can actually breathe around, she reads books from someone whose words put her in spirals, curling tight like hair around her neck until something must break. She talks to ghosts, hoping they will come alive again. She asks them to return things they were gifted. The ghost speaks and promises. She shudders, high off the fear, remembering the last time ghosts promised her anything. She wants to become the sea, takes everything with a pinch of salt. She keeps her side of the street clean, and the automation of it is infuriating.

The guitar track playing in her earphones fuel her courage. The strings pulse with the liquid flow of some soul who learned to make this machine an extension of themselves. She thinks, that is the work. That is the beauty of the world, that must be the reason she’s put here. The drums kick in softly first, and then with gusto - she remembers who she was, eight years old and able to be anything. She remembers the dust that slowly rises from behind the horse’s hooves, the feeling of flying atop its back, how she and a beast became one gorgeous mythical creature of old. She looks up at the sunset, how it kisses the sea, how it turns from fire to rose petals to the beginning of night.

She wants to become the sea, temperamental, unchained, treacherous.

The guitar dances its way to an end, electric twinkles that fade into the night sky. By the time the song is over, the page is full.

She hits send.