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I tried to time my breathing with the breakwater, to match the ragged exhalation of the tide.
I went with stick and sun behind me, flat feet slapping nude brown mud that bore no resemblance to sand. I stood to shield my eyes, and the hot air quivered. The thin furrow I had ploughed filled up with water. The foam between my toes was besilvered, mercurial. My blue-veined ankles bulged like the bellies of weird white fish.
Before I gained the beach I was already crying.
He come from between the dunes. He had cut his calves on pampas grass but he didn’t seem to mind. He bore a bucket full of shells, some brittle as conghigle, pink as tiny rosebuds. It’s alright, he said, I’m here. The cuts on his calves had matted sand to the fine blonde hairs. I bent to brush it away. It’s alright, he said, it doesn’t matter. He put the bucket down in the breakwater, I touched the warm tin with my toe. I am shaking so he pulls me to him. I’m sorry, he says, I’m so sorry.
I can feel the heat off him, the press of his flesh against mine. I want to find the baseline of his heart with my body, but I keep on missing the beat somehow. His smell is salt, is good, is clean, is air and earth. I do not want him to go.
He tells me it will be alright, he keeps telling me. I feel the hairs on my arms and legs turn towards him, the way flowers turn to follow the sun. I am drawn down on top of him, minutely magnetised. We lie in the breakwater. His fingers make a lazy ladder, milling up and down my vertebra. The water laps over us, it fills the bucket and the shells bob away, only the shells were rosebuds after all.
I hold his head to keep it from the breakwater. I kiss him. His mouth is slick and cold. His head is heavy. I grapple, he slips. His hair turns to kelp. I cannot keep him from the water. I pull at him. His face is cold and slick. His eyes are glass. There is blood on my hands. I do not want him to go.
I wash my hands in the breakwater. But the breakwater is black, is blood, is oil, is dirt, is piss and shit. He isn’t there. He’s gone.
There is no water now. There’s that same grey day the sirens came and nobody let me near enough to hold him. I could see his hand against the concrete like a paper boat capsized on an inland sea. I could see the shipwrecked relics of burnt out cars. I could see ragged pennants of torn plastic flying from the chain link like white flags of surrender. I saw the gurney come down, it’s scissor-legs creaking. There are seagulls and radio static and stray dogs barking at the blue on-off-again. There is a feeling of falling.
It will last for the rest of my life.
He’s gone. The basic absurdity of that fact makes me laugh like a fucking loony. His mouth is gone. His legs are gone. His chest is gone. His hands are gone. His voice is gone. His cock is gone. All of him, separate and together, particular and general. All of him, solid C student with a rare aptitude for physical grace.
Dead. The body inarticulate.
It’s panic that gets me. It’s the blasphemy of it, the obscenity of it. The ugliness of it. He used to sleep still and untroubled, breathing through his nose, just and self-sufficient. I would kiss his hairline, the only section of him that showed above the bedclothes. I never knew what not waking up was. If I’d known it could happen I’d have never let him sleep. I used to like to watch him sleep.
Dead. Drowned in sleep.
…
Happy now? I ask her. Was it worth it? Tell me it’s a safe place again, why don’t you? I was not ready for this.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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Ryan’s knot
