We board the ship we made from plastic tubing and rotted tires. We plugged its holes with rusted cans and patched its sails with shirts and shoes and strands of our hair. We are dressed for this mourning in black garbage bags, and we pierce our soles on the broken bottles that stitch the deck together.
We look around one final time, and then we cut the lines to the dock and watch the tepid dark foam swallow them whole. We are gulls caught in a current now, picking through corks and caps and rheumy fish eyes for the ruins of a nest, for what else can they do? There’s a staggering sweetness to the ocean air, and we gag at the sick of a sugary fermenting which laps up the sides of our boat and tongues at our insecurities.
We are still unsure of what it is we’ve sailed to do, and whether we should do it. One of us looks around and asks, do we really need this, and another one of us replies that, perhaps, it is too much.
Yet all around us the waves are stirring, and blooms of plankton crusted over with salt and chemical scabs rub up against the polystyrene sides of our ship, and in that shrieking irritation we hear our screams again. For it was on a hazy morning like this one that we cried and tore our hair and threw ourselves on the smoking ground. The fire burned through the trees and we, its funeral procession, lay prone at the edge of the sea like the prostrating gull who chokes up bottle lids and wires, for what else can it do.
And remember, someone says, the ashes we wore like gifts from cremation, a salvation of sorts, our throats splitting open on embers, and still no one was listening?
So we flock into a circle but we don’t look at each other and instead we face away to see the stained waters which echo the afterlives of corroded whale hearts. And we take that first step to cut open our bellies, and together we reach in to pull out a strand of milky seaweed, and we offer it up to those roiling, angry waves.
It’s a tearing sensation, and someone cries out, but shh, someone else soothes, for don’t you remember how it was to be dragged into that barred and lightless cavern? We were ripped from the ground where we had tied our own hands, and they used our own signs to stoke up the fire, and in the darkness we unfurled like the beaten gull, feathered and tarred and caught between those slicked, oily waves, for what else can it do.
And remember, someone says, dampening the walls with our wettened red handprints, weighted down by our bruised martyrdom, and straining for the siren’s call to sound an alarm that never came?
So then we reach deeper and pull harder and the strings of our seaweed are soon lined with pearls and white shells that we give to the ocean. We watch as nauseous crabs split them open and see the mouthless jellyfish suck them dry and yet we know that it is not enough. We punch at our sands, let them sieve through our fingers and bead onto the plastic packaging that crests the swelling waves. Our kelp and our corals we slice and tie off, impossible sailor’s knots that won’t come undone, and we look to the entrails of cigarette butts and rings which noose round the corpses of legless sea turtles, and we ask for reassurance.
But the water still circles and seethes, churning up grime and insult and the skeletal remains of rusted car frames. So we breathe alongside it and take one more moment – then we widen our gashes with our nails and our fingers, and we scream and we tear and we pull at our last vulnerabilities until we hold in our hands that final bloodied conch, its sharp edges unspooling our fears and uncertainties.
But now we have doubt, and we clench at the viscera and cut our hearts on its jagged slopes. We lay these conchs down on the deck and spread our wings over top, to shield them from the greasy waves which slosh up the sides of our boat and burn like hot oil.
Here we lie, our heads pressed against pocked plastic hulling, encircling that precious conch, trying to outlast those muffled inevitabilities which are always found waiting at expectant grave-sites. Then, someone speaks, and they whisper, remember, of what it was that was said. That if you ever have need of my life, come and take it.
We stand up at this and hold our conchs in our hands, and into their flesh we press one final kiss. And then with a scream that trills over the skies, we turn and we release and we give it all up to that twisting, moaning, endless graveyard. And in sudden forgiveness, we know a deep silence.
So here we sit, on plastic tubing and rotted tires, dressed in black mourning. Far off in the distance, we can still see that struggling gull as it thrashes and bucks, and so we close our eyes and bow our heads, and yet still we watch as it finally stops and it slips into those darkened, deadened waters. And that is when we start to grieve, for we know that this is the last of everything, and what else can we do?
