My body lies over the ocean
My body lies over the sea
My body lies over the ocean
So bring back my body to me
When I was small, I thought these were the lyrics and I never questioned their coexistence with the laws of physics. Whatever “I” was was here, on this western shore, and my body? My body was elsewhere.
So bring back my body to me
****
Absolution. The sinning of the sea slug. Ablutions. The worship of water. Absolutism. Able-bodied as a sea animal.
How do we not experience ourselves as liquid? How is it that we believe we are so very solid? When there is water in every square microscopic unit of our skin? When original sin was committed for the juice? When the heart & the honey are flowing through you constantly, cyclically, revolutions around your body which is not just clay & mud, it is not just dust to dust, but sea to radiant, illuminated, numinous, shining sea. Everything inside of us is an ocean. How can I explain, when my tongue is liquid, when my words are water, when my mouth is the open cave covering an underground lake…I can’t. Just let it all flow over you.
The sin of the modern world is the belief that we are all solid. And that we should be. That oceans don’t erect their own boundaries. They do, they do as salt imbues, eats away, corrodes at the edges.
Let’s not be wooden blocks. Let’s be what we need under the night sky & the eye of the heart will see us off to the sea. We learned to dance by opening our mouths upward to the heavens raining sustenance on us & we thought, if it is so very easy to be nourished & nurtured, let’s move our bodies & wriggle & roll & twist our souls just a little bit cause IT FEELS GOOD.
The dance of water. The joy of the deep. The urge to merge. Bliss. Let’s all be liquid. Let’s not be exacting & count & cut exactly to measure all the ways that we owe each other. Let’s all be Piscean. Just for one early morning, I want to be a fish with you. Flounder around in the oceans of origins & the seas of surrender. Let’s go to school together. Learn to swim as a set. Mimicking each other’s’ movement.
Hold the heart in your hand. Hold it as humbly as you can. Ask the goddess for grace & gentleness as you caress & cradle it, for lord, we do not know our own strengths.
Be with me. Be with me. Be one with me. Bring me into yourself. Hold me. Hold all of me, even the parts of me that are holding you. Wrapped around you. Suckerfish. Squid tentacles flexed. Suction cups growing from our chests so we will stay like this. Forever. &. Always.
I came to you. I came, closer & closer, came into you, & onto you, & inside of you. You invited me inward, yielding, like the softest spots of jellyfish. But with the antidote to your stinging. You didn’t close up as a sea anemone does, though I cut you with my fins. You stayed serene, tentacles waving in the watery winds, signalling me, a lighthouse at the bottom of the sea, guiding my ship into your port. & i decided that nothing, nothing, could be better than this. An aquatic dance. A conversation. A cutting of the ties that bind & a weaving of rope harvested from heartstrings. Strong. Strong as stones & stairways to heavens we haven’t visited yet & the forceful slap of the sea upon a rocky beach but as yielding & buoyant as the saltiest waters on earth, though they are not dead to me.
We must be our own mothers on this side of saturn’s return. Our own fathers. Siblings to our selves. We are the children born of our own bodies. Flesh of our own flesh.
Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. When I am playing so many people to myself, sometimes it’s hard to see me. To see you. Seeing you see me is enough to bring me back to life. Back to myself. Back to water.
Bring back, bring back, bring back my body to me, to me.
afrose fatima ahmed 