She crashes over me like thirty-foot swells, battering aside my defenses like weather-worn, wooden palisades in a hurricane and I, tossed and turned by undertows, have managed to talk her out of drowning me. For the moment. Her tempers, I gather, are gathering tempests. She soothes and rages like Zeboim. She's a force of nature, beauty embodied in power. She'll leave me with scars if I'm careful and shattered, mercilessly, against a cliffside if I'm not. Though I've stayed afloat thus far by strength of will and crafty plays of word, it can't be long before my awe distracts me, and I drown.
Saying I want her is like saying the sun is bright. It is something that can't be quantified, unless broken into such minute detail it becomes hardly worth saying. I, by merely existing, want her. It is a simple truth, a physical characteristic, like the brightness of the sun. Something that just is.
Perhaps the sea salt in my blood has saved me, or the ocean air that clings to my lungs, trapped there as I am trapped, not unwillingly, in this current. I have never felt comfortable being too far from the ocean, more than a few hours drive to the coast and I grow listless, as if part of me is somewhere out of reach.
She is like that. Out of reach, unattainable, untouchable. On a plane somewhere beyond mere mortal perception. I feel as if some cosmic tear has been created, some rend in the membranous tissue between worlds, at even being able to glimpse her as she rolls over me. I would reach through, and run my fingers through her hair, but I'm afraid my flesh would simply cease to exist in such a place. We often glorify the object of our affection, but this feels less like desire, and more like a gift. The gods, it seems, are as infinte in their mercy as they are in humor.
I feel drawn in two directions, torn between dancing this silver-tongue dance, continuing to pirouette, to spin and leap until breath escapes me and I fall, panting, or dead, to the stage. Torn between letting the words that swell and churn within me continue to pour outward and stepping through that span between worlds and seizing her in my arms.
My fear then, is not that I would die in the passage, but what I would do once I laid hands upon her.
I could not shred such a creature, even should I be granted the power to tear waves from the sea. I could not sink my claws into her flesh, tearing into limbs and devouring her as I have so often done. Nor could I surrender entirely, give up the power I've craved and killed for, and allow her to devour me as so many have tried. I would wage a war within myself, then, a war without end.
I would relish every second.
She bursts in my imagination, a star going supernova. She could swallow everything in her path with pure, destructive energy, but she prefers to create like some goddess, bounding effortlessly from world to world and planting seeds on each, leaving behind roses and tigerlillies, flowering in the mid-afternoon sun. Each of them a garden, each of them teeming with lives.
Perhaps I have gone too far in a strange direction, now. From characterizing concepts as feminine entities to creating a concept of a woman, but I see little difference. She radiates, and I am pulled into her orbit, seized by gravity or something less substantial and more imagined. Something very akin to affection, but infinitely more vast.
Perhaps I've inhaled entirely too much water.
In time, I'm sure, it will rust my gleaming, steel armor. Cause my, admittedly golden, heart to decay, tarnish my silver tongue. The sea will come to claim me and I will go along with it. As I said, I have never felt right being too far from it.
Until then, I will have her, in this world or some other. In one capacity or another. I will wrap her in arms of flesh or of letters, and let her drift away on lilting lines of poetry or fall asleep on the rocking, steady beat of my heart in her ear. I will pour kisses across her naked skin like sweet, warm rain in late June, or I will spill out pages of sweet nothings, little nonsenses to coax a smile to her lips. And I will bask in that glow, from near or afar, as the tides may take us both, until the ocean claims my body, and the gods of this world or the next claim the soul.
Delightfully Yours,
-S.R.
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