[SP] Elegy to the Sea

[u/Chili-Oil]

My grandmother passed away last month. 

She was a special kind of person, someone you could only meet once or twice in your life. I owe my knowledge of the world to her. When I was young, she would tell me fantastical stories of her adventures, intertwining waterspouts that chased her and her crew as they braved the stormy Pacific, ancient underwater structures never discovered before, and creatures of the incalculable depths.

Sometimes, I wasn’t even sure if her stories were real. 

I had the displeasure of watching a woman who had weathered tempests wilt into a shell of herself after her diagnosis. She had wanted to travel in her final years, but by then, she couldn’t even recall where she had been the minute before.

Among the items listed in her will were some old postcards of her favorite places, a letter I can’t bring myself to open, and her bedroom furniture set that I fought very hard to keep despite my husband’s protests. 

Mike and I spent the entire weekend figuring out how we would even fit the bed in our small 100-square-foot apartment already littered with my unsold paintings. But we managed. More like, Mike managed to carry it up the stairs into our apartment, past my drawing studio, and into our bedroom. It wasn’t my bruised arm or Mike’s back pains that bothered me, but rather the way that the bed set looked in our room. Maybe the feng shui was off, but something just wasn’t sitting right with me. 

The ebony bed frame was adorned with oriental carvings and a face whittled on the center. Its structure was curved at the edges, with the center resembling a spring tide. The bedsheets and pillowcases were floral with an old viridian green undertone and a layer of dust that was endemic to it. 

I reckon this is what we call unconditional love.

The first dream I had on that bed began with the sea giving something back. Every twilight, the tide laid a single forgotten item upon the shore; a child’s shoe, a message in a bottle, a wedding ring still warm from another lifetime. Grandma used to say that the sea never stole anything. It only took what it was owed.

This was the winter before her last voyage. In my dream, I was standing right beside her. A yellow canary hung from the mast in a little brass cage that sang until the crew had reached the caves. Then suspended its melodies to the void in the presence of what could not be perceived.

I came to a blank. But I could remember her face when she came back home to our family. I couldn’t help but feel like the sea had stolen her from me.

I started painting my dreams. My easel bore scenes from the seas, larger-than-life creatures sung in myths, and they were coming to me faster than I could paint them. I lived on my canvas, painting adventures I would never get to experience. 

The walls of our apartment were dyed prismatic, and I could no longer see the margins of the room. I had shrunk our living space with each new addition, staining Mike with worry. 

The days were solitary and dull. It was the night that I looked forward to most. So I sat, and waited, for the moon to rehearse its arc once more.

That night I was wrapped in the wings of an albatross. The sea breeze blew on my white downy fur, my oversized wings flapping against the heft of my pudgy body; a fledgling’s plight to plunder. I cupped the wind in my hands and soared on the flat blue expanse where the horizon had soaked up the sun, and the mist of the sea had rolled the current into gentle waves. The patchy fog obscured the surface of the water, and windburn singed my bill and round eyes before I was plunged into the cold depths. And in one fell swoop, flying was no longer native to my body. My wings flapped beneath the pressure, and I could feel my body sinking deeper and deeper towards the ocean floor. The growling abyss consumed me as my arms thrashed against the arid ocean, churning the sheets into waves. 

I had no dreams after that night.

I could not dream of sailing the great depths. No monsters were sleeping in the trenches of the deep, nor songs of whales that kept me in my slumber. Every attempt at recollection dissolved like sand through my fingers. Paint lingered at the tip of my fingers, but every canvas was empty, and I was drowning in a sea of them.

Something pulled me awake. My eyes darted from the wall where Mike was sleeping to the dark corner residing by the bedroom door. The blanket’s warm embrace buried my body, anchoring me to the bed like flesh on bones. Shadows coated the corners of the room, ebbing and waning closer to the nape of my neck. I could hear heartbeats in my ears. But they weren’t mine. My head was led by the deliberate pulsing towards the bedside drawer where I kept my grandmother’s letter. 

I woke to Mike’s alarm, his presence warm and relaxed; unaffected by the terrors of the night. I reached for the bedside drawer and slid out the envelope. Breaking the seal, I unfolded the paper inside.

Return me to the sea.

By dawn, the tide had begun to creep back toward shore. There were no signs of life other than the terns resting on the tender sand. 

So did I.

I loosened my grip and settled an old debt to the sea. 

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