Grandmother always told the darkest stories on the days that were lightest, the ones that weighed nothing. One those days, when we were almost giddy with bubbling sunshine and the billowing of blue sky above, we would feel the full heaviness of her words. We listened to every one, swelling with them like seaweed absorbs salt. I can still tell them now, all of them, although not in her voice. Her voice had a lilt, a sweet drifting that wrapped strangely around those darkest stories, a rocking that reminded me of the sea.
She told us, once, how she became sea. First, she said, comes the drinking; an inescapable thirst that cannot be quenched by anything other than rainwater. Every sea starts in the sky. Every raindrop is a small, clear longing. You will never want to stop drinking, she said, because every drop is a promise and you think that’s enough, but no matter how drenched you become, drinking alone will not make you a sea.
Then comes the sweat. It pours from your body, soaking through everything in its path. Skin, sheets, clothes. Your world begins to chill and shiver, hot on the inside and cold on the outside; rivers of it run down the clefts and folds of you, turning you into a flowing being that can only think of becoming sea. All that water. Streams of it, spreading through you like a root system, waxing and waning in flood and drought. All seas, she said, flow tidal through the body before they ever see the moon.
Next, the clawing, the tearing of breath that is suddenly too big for what holds it. How can a body hold the sea? You cry now, and the water gathers salt. You let loose the howl that has lain inside you for generations, trapped where your breastbone meets the softness of your stomach, and it’s this part of you that cracks open first. An estuary, widening. Opening further and further until one side can no longer see the other.
I never went further, she said, I had to turn back. Can you imagine the pain of a body sucking a sea back into itself? Here, she looked at Mother, waves of resentment lapping at the shores of her eyes. You can be sea or you can be woman, you cannot be both. But you…and here she looked at my sister and me…you could do it. If you wanted to. It isn’t too late for you.
It rained that night. Torrents of water tumbling from the sky as if especially for us, to slake the thirst that had already dried our throats to desert-dry bone. One of you, Grandmother said, and we clung together. If we held on tightly enough, we thought, our bodies would become one again as they had been in the womb, fused and then torn by a trick of nature. Never a whole girl, always a half. But Grandmother peeled us apart. One, she insisted. Because a sea cannot be a sea unless there is land to hold it.
I think about that now, when I walk on the beach; when my feet sink into a softness that is neither land nor sea. It was my sister who drank, my sister who opened the window and gulped the rain straight from the sky while I buried my face in Mother’s breast. It will be okay, I remember her saying, it will be okay. Yet within me, too, there is always a murmur. A faint slapping and sucking and rushing that draws me here, to the in-between, where it can be shaped and sculpted into words. I never swim. But sometimes I come to the beach in a storm, when the wind whips the sea into water and salt and froth, and I let it soak my face. It’s the only way I know of to be with my sister again; the safest way I know of to drown.
