when I was younger I was terrified of the ocean 

I loved splashing at the shoreline, but when my parents prompted me into deeper waters I would freeze, head filled with this image of the sand- which seemed so steady beneath my wiggling toes- suddenly dropping off into a deep black pit swarming with sharks licking their chops and waiting for a tiny swimmer to paddle out beyond her depths 

but my father would toss me on his shoulder and carry me shrieking into the rolling waves and it always turned out safe 
and sure as the tiny pails of cemented sand and seawater I carried from the shore to fortify my castles 

didn’t it? 

I carry that weight with me still, but my garishly painted child’s bucket has shattered into jagged, sharp pieces that I clutch too tight in my hands. their corners dig into my palms and run rivulets of blood down my arms, mixing with the saltwater washing endlessly across my cheekbones. they run rivers across my skin, mapping freckled constellations, cutting into the snowy slope of my shoulders, lapping at the shifting coastline of my fingertips, and dripping down the treacherous ridges of my ribcage. 

how strange, to know my skin so well 
and how strange, to be a stranger standing at the shoreline of my own mind

I am one tiny grain of sand blowing in an endless expanse of windy dunes

and it’s almost comforting to know that limit, to be underwhelmed by my insignificance 

until I catch myself the break between the ocean and the safe shore, a place where I cannot be content with being small. the full weight of my sheer shallowness and the paltriness of my emotional progress and my misdirected, untreated, festering wounds bears down on me and I am heavy and lost and weak 

I feel like I’ve come so far and yet in all this time, I don’t know if I’ve learned a single speck of my soul. my six year old’s mind is still paralyzed with the fear of that depth- that seething pit of darkness, of saltwater tears and whispering monsters and passionate anger and fear 

how strange, to be churning to stay afloat in this sea, to feel tears running into rivers feeding right back into the thundering expanse of these crashing waves

and to be so calmed by the notion of drowning