People call the woman crazy, but everything else knows otherwise. The skies, the birds, the winds, the trees, the waves, the sun, the clouds know – she belongs to the waters.

 

Two weeks now those legs of her never tire from their pilgrimage to the shorelines, the waves tumbling and leaping to meet her shins, sand encompassing the crevices between toes gleaming with small cuts from trekking barefooted from her confinement of a room to the cheering salty outdoors, the salt coiling inside her lungs. The winds giggle by her, secrets and tales of the corners of streets and reveries of mournful lovers and a million scattered words discarded without care to the sky are gathered along the receding sand, tiny grains reflecting truths and lies hushed into the foundations of this land. She stares at the blue waters, dripping borrowed blue dye from the skies above, laced with the underlying green of swaying sea grass, sprawling leaves tossing under the water surface, reminiscent of a frantic dance.

 

They try, oh how they try to stop her from leaving the confines of four walls. The water is deep, the words grip at her arms, swirling letters immobilising elbows, the waves will wash you away, those sounds echo between the gaps on her fingers, you’ll drown.

 

Perhaps it’s foolhardy for those around her to exert this amount of care and attentiveness to her state of being, her safety – humans are inherently selfish creatures and the singular moment they exhibit care for others belongs to the minutes before death where all altruism inherent in many but displayed by none emerges and suddenly the dying person becomes a saint revered in their conversion.

 

The woman despises the attentiveness; she cares naught for it. No thoughts were given freely to her wellbeing before they found the dashes of pouring crimson lines along her wrists and her neck, and suddenly she is a priority, to be cared for at all time and all cost. Shadows between the bars and crosses of the window on the walls mocked her vehemently and the strangulated hold the small room impressed on her at every blink of the eye choked her in every physical and mental plane and she needed to leave. Where to? Who to? What to?

 

The sea called to her. Simply calling. Murmuring soft tones of dulcet washing waves, quietly, profoundly. Her feet already clasped the wet sands clumping underfoot and the air forced into her lungs spun the rationality in her mind, the cogs and mechanisms inside her clanged in the ravine of her mind, spiralling with her exalted cackling under the cloudless night sky. Stars rained their ethereal droplets of light washing onto her shoulders and hair as her feet twirled to the maniacal beats of periodical waves crashing onto land. Dark fathomlessness called onto her and letting that one hand loose on the settling wind smoothing out the folded pieces of skin wrinkled with the ghost slicings of a kitchen knife. She swallowed in the starlight and the unroofed sky and the bottomless waters and barely hushed wind spiced with spiky chillness - all of it - becoming the granulated minerals whimpering underfoot.

 

Countless of times they had caught and imprisoned her, but the sea's calls are permanent marks on her soul, visible in the wide irises of her eyes, brimming at their edges with the uncontainable need to be one with the chafing waters that kills that mourns that burns that nourishes that nurtures - they cannot stop her but they can try to detain her. They put metals on her windows and thick bars on her doors, laced the ventilation with a glue that gripped the metal foundation with a grip akin to liquid fire and submerged powder into her food. She did not eat, she did not drink - the suffocating air lamented the imprisonment of her own mind, ears crying under clasped palms. seaseaseaseaseaseasea.

 

Nature answered her feverish prayers parked on flaking skins cascading from the holes on her lips and the door hummed and shook on its hinged placement on the floor. The door swung back and forth, embracing the roaring of the tumultuous winds outdoors to flood the suffocating air presiding behind the structured room, encumbered and contained within a small space. Humans call the ‘the will of Nature’ – ‘the work of God’ – revering the natural and the religious as sentient beings higher than they are and disconnected from their actions and thoughts. But the sea is just as she is, as anyone is, as all of humanity is. In viewing their selves separate from what already existed in their souls, people pass by the connection that they have with this revered Force, something incomprehensible, uncontrollable, not of reach of their hands. They do not understand, so they are afraid. Mocked, vilified, cursed – the sea bitterly retreats to its fathomlessness and leaves man’s troubles to themselves.

 

But she hears the voice of a million tunes blending into a singular harmony from her right where her left listens to the conspiratorial whispers of the waves. She belongs here, with nature, her birthright, her only claim, her place of belonging, her soul. Wide horizons chase the receding spectrum of bright shades across the undulating skies, melting and morphing and engulfing guileless clouds spinning into cotton candy and vague clumps of cotton. The glare from the Sun is frightening and too confronting for some, but it warms her. They, they do not understand how completely at rest she is when she is here, bathed yet clothed from the Sun’s gentle caresses as if the old Titan of myths forgotten in the stones and marbles is her lover at the last moments before light consummates its union with the shadow.

 

Pedestrians are staring at her and perhaps they are thinking of how strange she is. But this is her element and her soul is drifting out there in the sun-soaked water surface glistening with violet spills and mellow honey liquids, the ghost-like warmth from the receding sunlight still humming under her skin. The winds had heeded her beseeching calls for escape, for union with the ocean, for escaping that choking hold inside those walls that searches the pulse inside her throat and slowly wrenches out every last breath she swallowed inside her lungs. She had jumped – the hinges rattled on the wall and cried in terror at this violation of their function – and collapsed out in the roaring turbulence to regain her air. Cold breaths of Aeolus’s realm dripped down her throat and spilt over her eyes and nose, lodging in her throat, murmuring nothings and somethings.

 

It seems that the gods are watching over her.

 

The gods, whose essence contains the scattered remains of her soul that she is desperately trying to retrieve, bits and pieces that anchor her name inside this hollow shell of a malnourished woman whose arms shook too much and cheeks sunken into her teeth. All her blood had been emptied out that day inside the small kitchen with roaring jets of chloride water pelting the aluminium sink in angry torrents and a part of her soul left her.

 

She does not know her name – it has been taken from her, little by little, by the man who she dearly loved and dearly respected, whose fingers prodded inside the places that she never dared touch herself and forced the vice-like clutch of her inner thighs open, letting the seeds that birthed her and her brother back inside her. He called that name which she forgotten, over and over while he pushed her down, the inside of her cheeks blood-raw and lumpy with bitten flesh. Maybe if Pandora had not forsaken humankind, then suffering would not occur – but these are useless thoughts – Pandora or not, people will be people, and people will continue to hurt people. Pain is intrinsic of human nature and ultimately, don’t all humans live off the suffering of others to create their own twisted heaven?

 

The man stopped touching her after that night, but the spiral inside her mind continued to orbit out of its designated path, and she faced the disgust of her weakness, her inability to do something, to stop him, to run away, to seek help. Maybe maybe maybe, the chant grew obsessive inside her mind, I can die, and the madness will stop.

 

She was crazed – drugged with drunken insanity rival those of Dionysus’s followers the maenads – and drove the pointed tip under the thick layer of skin that belonged to her but no longer hers. She was a stranger inside her own self, trapped with fragments of a soul and a name she no longer knew. Her mind roared on some days and disappeared on others, and she walked within a circle of silhouetted path where the destination was obstructed by the stab of pain inside her stomach and the rewind of the events that robbed her of her purity, the only thing valuable and sacred to womankind. She was detested – by herself and by others – living was no longer a viable choice. The pain inside her wrist, cutting the veins did not hurt – the pain at seeing her brother, young and red-faced, did.

 

For he had rushed her to the hospital and was taken away when her father came. For he had screamed at the man who birthed him for the crimes he committed. For he had been struck down and taken away for her. For her brother who loved and loves and still love her.

 

She sees traces of him in the sand under her cut soles and above in the gull-occupied skies. The dome of Uranus’s domain winks at her squinted eyes and whistles a lover’s tune to her ears. Children laugh around her, their oblivion and carefreeness and love to the world infectious even in her wretched state. She races to the edge of the water, toes and ankles deep under soft cerulean waves and simply stares at the frothy white horizon.

 

Her mother took her here once. To the ocean where she sang tales and stories of heroes long forgotten and gods and goddesses who are amongst them all. Her brother had fallen in step with the parading gulls and screamed in delight when the waves raced along with his little feet. Mother, her long hair that shone with the blackest black under yellow skies, laughed in harmony with the gulls and picked her up, finger pointing to the horizon.

 

“When you need to look for yourself, always look to the sea. It is where you are born, and where you will return to after living.”

 

She is listening to that advice now, skin rubbed bare and bloody with her long trek of a fortnight from her prison to the seaside that her mother dear, the woman who had embarked on a voyage and never came back, took her to. Her soul, hiding from corners unseen by her, peeks, but is enough for her to know that some of it has returned. The name she didn’t dare call on before.

 

Knees submerged in the water now, she never glances back. Stomach, chest, elbows, shoulders, neck, collarbones, chin, nose, crown of head. Her hair trails under the blue waves and dissipates with the sea winds.

 

Coffee fumes. Clinking crockery and cutlery. Vivaldi’s symphonies in the background.

 

“Rapist beaten to death in rehabilitation centre by fellow inmates.”

 

A figure stills in front of the kitchen bench. “I see.”

 

“The bastard deserved it.”

 

A soft hum above the whir of the boiling water. A soft metallic clinking on the sink.

 

“Sis…”

 

The back turns to face the man dining at the table – cheeks full and eyes light.

 

“No such language at the table. Let’s take Pierce out for a walk.”

 

“Is she awake?”

 

The woman with the sea in her soul smiles at the boy whose love for her transcends boundaries.

 

 

 

“Perhaps.”