A Light from Dark Shores

I don’t understand what has happened to me in the last few days. I feel like I’ve been tumbled in freezing water and dropped into place. My arms feel week, my chest is aching, I feel like I am going to cry at any moment. I am overwhelmed in a sadness rooted far behind my eyes, in a place I can’t seem to reach when I sit still and think on myself.

I reached out into the world and asked it for something I wanted. I said who I was, and waited for jaws to take my hands from me, and instead I met a soul like mine who sits outside reality and watches the way that I do. Even still, we watch from different kinds of outside, and I see their brilliant eyes through two panes of glass. But already I have seen how the colors swirl when we communicate by tapping toward each-other. I can only imagine what it must look like to them. They have already shown me the gift of their color.

I haven’t seen another creature trapped the way I am until I met all of these beautiful people, and then all at once I saw how desolate my existence has been, a fact I have wrestled with all my life and still, for some reason, I meet it anew every day as though I can somehow forget when I sleep that I am so alone. The warmth of another body is so far outside of my heart, I have learned how hungry I have been at the caress of this new world. I have found nerves and organs within me which had never felt beyond a primordial daze.

It hurts the most that this hurt is keeping my love smothered under the surface of my skin, underneath my churning stomach where I can’t seem to vomit the sludge out of the way. Where are the shores of that vast, oceanic soul whose depths I’d learned to love exploring? I am lost in the jungles of an island inside my heart, and I know that I am not travelling in a straight line. I know that I am walking in circles. I know that it is growing dark, but I also know that I will survive here.

When I die, it will be in a moment when I can say that I was trying to do the right thing. Today, the right thing to be is scared. I am too small for this place, I am too blind, I am too weak. I cannot look ahead to how grateful I will be when I am spared the horrors I see following this coastal dusk, my hope is shot through with fear, my body aches for oblivion. I might feel like a fool to awaken tomorrow, like a drunk, in warm sand by soft waves. Tonight I cannot remember the feeling of laughter on my face. Tonight I’ve no face at all.

As I climb a half-fallen palm, whose slope will not keep the crabs from me, and tuck myself in a nook where sleep may come only in jolts, I do not see a horizon between the sea and sky. The colors fade perfectly upward, and there are no stars. I am an insect on a leaf in a dead grey shell. Then, so far away that it marks the edge of the sky, the beam of a lighthouse glitters. I will watch it, and count the turns, and wait for sleep to come.