Ocean

If you fall off the boat you die. The ocean is cold enough to kill you. Weed in your hair and fish picking at your bones till you are clean. The idea is that you go to sleep with the cold, a gentle death and one I come back to.

Two days ago I dreamed that a young woman I vaguely know was screaming at me, hurling abuse. I deserved it. She was right to call me what she did. I am not to rest easy. I woke up after hardly any sleep and fell back fitfully, returning to her, facing her anger as I too afraid to face the truth of my fears in real life.

I look in the water and it is clear and icy and it would rock you to sleep. There is something calming about the possibility of death. The difference between my shouting woman and the lure of an icy mermaid is a huge leap. Back there are my mistakes, tangled in the wrack of my dreams, my fears, my unrest. Here there is just the calm cold final kiss of nature. Somehow it makes me happy to be so close to my own end although I know I am not yet so far down that I will leap off the boat to find it.

Down in the deep death is a naked woman with nice breasts. There is the image of me suckling, drowning, breathing in her cold milk as if it were air. There is something akin to orgasm in her embrace. My nipples turned hard by the freeze of my own death, the shot of salt water tearing into every orifice with her ragged nails. She is not a gentle lover, I am sure of it, but some days I peer down over the side of the boat and I long for her kiss, preferring this than that awful sleepless night and the day of crying that followed it.