HIS TURN
Swim. It crept up toward him, the half-thought becoming heartfelt:
Swim
. The longer he remained at her side, the more ashamed he felt for having felt the way he did. Her fault? He couldn’t be sure she was anything but perfect. The longer they fought the waves, floated against the current, the more he could almost believe that he really could swim. He had been barely able to stay afloat during those days, when a heartbeat acted as backdrop to his prize, her. He stretched all the dollar signs as far as they could go, fed the edge of all fashion with imaginary currency. All for her, and yet he never felt like he was doing anything but drowning.
Swim. He had only the blue of the water, perhaps matching the blue of those borrowed eyes, around him to distract from what cannot be done. Just like him to believe that only he could apologize, that only he was at fault.
To hold on, there had to be another ledge. Of course the lonely ledge would be the one of a lover unwilling to let go. But see where this is going? This tale starts and stops, but has everything to do with the residual, the residue that remains of a person, ghost-like to those alive, barely a glimmer to those who have died. From the depths, the coffin is a blotch, something to swim to, if swimming would lead anywhere after you’ve met the ocean floor. He will be first. He is the first to let go.
He had reason to apologize, but it was so much easier to tempt the waters. Where she sat, he avoided, and avoiding in such a small coffin would have been impossible if they hadn’t the body to borrow. This was the problem. He could barely stand to see himself. If he turned to her, he would have to look at quite the sickly sight. His was a body that had been let go too early, at a time when there had been too much life left to walk.
The sea rippled, tensing up the five letters. Voiced on the waves, it was his voice, saying the word.
Sorry.
So sorry.
He had been so bitter, so angry. She reciprocated; they felt and fought the same woe. There had been conflict, peeling them apart as grief continued to set in. He watched the waves clash, the waves rolling to the unforeseen. The waves seemed to point the way. The waves ran into each other, the sound made upon colliding as if to say, delve deeper. If he jumped off the edge he would still be swimming. There’s no changing the fact that, in the tense exhales of aftermath, he now understood.
He had led them nowhere. He might have been confident that they could return but… return where? Therein lies the problem. He had no clear destination in mind.
The past, once so certain, simply met with the horizon, forming the entire expanse that eluded him.
The floating there was indeed a waiting, in the same way what he worded-out as a perfect apology was simply more talk of the mind. The mind unraveled, talking itself into untold corners that should have been a helpful shadow under a scorching sun, pulverizing his ability to see. And yet he watched, looking for signals in the sea. Sorry.
Sorry for having shouted at you. Sorry for making no sense. Sorry for being nonsense. Sorry for letting this happen. I might have saved you. And then, as per the talk of talking back, more apologies, sorry for thinking that I could.
Having to say something, this is what he said:
“I love you.” He meant it but he wanted to tell her so much more than those three words, a phrase that synchronizes the various complications that turn any relationship into a wreckage of memory and breakneck feelings, a kind of loathing that led to the desire to love again.
I love you.
It wasn’t an apology but it would have to do. No more looking away. He used his turn to face her. He blinked once and decided that her eyes would once again be hers.
HER TURN
She closed one eye and cupped her hand around the other, focusing in on a patch of water where waves merged to mimic the shape of a human mouth. The sea wanted to speak, but all she heard were the words that she kept to herself. Accusatory in nature, she hid in the borrowed body, secretly attacking herself for having pushed the only one still close by, even after everything, and quite literally everything, disappeared beyond the horizon. He remained her anchor and chain as much as she was his. Never mind their past; never mind their future. The present was what got the best of her. It was what worried her most. It was what pulled at her, a threat that nothing would change; no matter how much she did to bargain a better draw.
Reverted to the past, she rode out the same lines that could be reread, if one desired, in the preceding turns, during that stage of letting go that had brought her to this juncture in the first place.
Quick to nag, quick to be numb, she wasn’t swimming to escape him. She swam to escape herself. The fact that seeing him meant having to see that vain smile, the threat to be perfect that made her a threat to everyone brought close, only tightened the tether, soaked it in kerosene, ready to spark with a single shift of the situation. If anything went wrong, she was the tantrum to turn everything to cinders. Burnt ash.Blame.Can’t carry the blame so she tosses it to the person nearest, closest, most dear.
Flicker but nothing fades. She was still here.
Bathed in sunlight, the borrowed body felt heavier, and she watched, distantly felt, as it began to stink. The sweat was yellow, the bodily fluids escaping the drying body, a murky brown, it was an odor that only she could smell. The water would wash it away, she thought. A smell so overpowering and bitter when she brought back up the past, every single time she had treated him as less.
Less a man and more a burden.
She banked on herself before she would any bond.
The water tempted her, the mock-mouth opening and closing as she heard the thoughts in mind resonate across the waves.
He would do anything for you. You were on your deathbed and he tried to save you. He did all he could and listened through all your nonsense, all your bullshit and stupid blaming. Even when you forgot how to breathe, how to blink, he breathed for you. He remained at your side, putting drops in your eyes.
Her with a question. Her with an answer.
The waves mouthing the word:
Sorry. But when she tried to speak, she saw that words alone weren’t what had begun to expire. Beyond the sundrenched scene existed a limitation; a borrowed body was a body all the same. Past-due and setting sail across curious waters that no physical map would ever reveal, not even so much as a mark, the body becomes the final marker, the final compass pointing the direction of expiration. Sorry. Say it.
I am sorry.
She tore open the mouth stitched closed by dry lips, saying all that she believed she had heard. Everything that she needed to have told him, meant to tell him for so long, as long as it will take to tell the entire tale, the hundreds of pages, and perhaps so much more, but for all the effort, all that she had wanted to say, every line that had been fought over in her mind, became invisible as it left her mouth. Invisible to both line and page. The only words that came out were the same words he had told the sea.
“I love you.”
Neither character heard each other, relegated to speak without using speech, but for that one moment, when she listened to what she had said, articulated in his voice, a fire rose that gave her the cue to turn and face him.
If it meant saying “I love you” a thousand times to rid herself of the smell, she would drench the coffin in the word “love.”
HIS TURN
He met her eye-to-eye, blinked when she blinked, and breathed out when she pretended to breathe. He saw a sweaty, double-chinned, bald face, a face so familiar, it took him this long to get the lines right. It took an entire life; by now, those lines were the length of waves headed in no clear direction.
He met her mouth with his and then said, “Are we having fun?” Imagining what she might be thinking, he bartered another “I love you,” and watched the sparkle in those eyes.
How dull he must appear to her from behind those old, apathetic eyes. Desperate though he may have been, he bargained that she saw only a fraction of the sunlight, understood only a small flicker of his apology.
“I love you” was her response.
“I love you” was his only reply.
“I love you” once again, he began to see tears welling up, tears that had seldom been shed from those sorrowful, admittedly unremarkable eyes.
He said it again, and watched as they started down her face. He wiped them away before they could travel down her cheek; dragging a finger across her face forced him to feel the various blemishes and pockmarks, grime and skin tearing of a body he had misused.
“I love you,” he said and meant every word.
“I love you,” she replied and seemed to retreat into that body. Their faces flush, hands held, potbelly and nearly flat-breasted chest pressed, he could sense her fleeing him in the one way possible. He had so much to tell her.
He met her fault with his, which came out as a forlorn and melancholy “I love you.”
It is admirable to see someone care about another so much that he’d say anything to conceal true feeling, to keep her here. I love you, I love you, I love you—repeated in a rhythm that matched what’s missing:
A heartbeat.
Blurred sight, tears fell. His, much like hers, was a silent cry, tears that blinded him as much as they seemed to blind her.
And though they continued to look, they could no longer see. All he saw was the cloudy black of those two eyes.
This was the result of forced feeling, and though they felt, neither him nor her could grasp the language to let it all out.
They settled on “I love you.” He laundered feeling underneath the word “love.” When the tears did not stop, he languished, feeling an all-too-familiar loneliness. Blinded by the tears, he no longer saw her. All he could smell was his own body odor, his own foul breath, as she exhaled in panicked, practiced bursts. He closed the eyes, opened them, and closed them again. He flushed the fresh tears, letting them fall down the borrowed body’s cheeks, her rosy cheeks, and felt each eyelid. He felt as her eyes anxiously moved left to right, as if reading how this will end.
What you must do.
He opened the eyes and used the same fingers to feel them out of their sockets. He handed them back to her alongside a forlorn, apologetic “I love you.”
She reached for them and blinked.
Tears beyond what she needed to feel, he was glad when she took them and, best of all, when she gave him his.
“Are we having fun?” as if to inquire how she felt. She nodded and placed her eyes in her borrowed face.
Blink, and he did the same.
HER TURN
“I love you,” she could finally see him through the worry. “I love you” she could recall the good between the bad. “I love you,” the words did not come but she remembered a time when coming froze everything until she felt every little thing, touch, taste, smell… until she exhaled, never more confident that she was alive.
“I love you,” became a cipher for dead speech, what he had said to her and what she said back. Tongues remained tight, and mouths dry, but a breath could be brought up if she felt it right.
“Are we having fun?” she might ask even though there was no answer because there really was no question. Yes, him and her together were a fun time, a fun coupling, no bother about the impossibility of their fun, and how really their past was as nonexistent as their future. It was what could be read between the lines, what happened between those transitory moments of reality, that she found escape.
Theirs was a fictional story, but it resembled the friction of affection when it did not fit for society.
“I love you,” the cipher to speak and say I’m sorry.
An “I love you” in return acted as an acceptance.
A follow-up from him “I love you” was to say that he wanted to apologize too.
Fun was the bargain they had bought, and though it might have never happened, in the dead of all dead seas, this vacant sea as invisible as it wanted to be, she fixed an image and hid behind what she couldn’t imagine herself to be.