Romance In A Column

chapter twenty,

Us humans are innately talented at those things whose end is death, but Eryn hadn't known to say that then; when the sixteen-year-old boy peered down at her and, through overgrown front teeth, said: "It's easier than you think. Drowning, I mean." 

"First rule." Strands of copper hair hung with salty beads of sea over his eyes, matted against his acne and freckle ridden face, he outstretched a hand to a young Eryn sprawled beside a longboard. Her rash shirt had ridden up and shore-side sand pressed its cool palm onto the small of her back. "When you're under, never look up."

Skin stretched taut over his bones and his knees bumped one another as he crouched to her side, sensing his gesture would flitter through the hovering heat of the day to be carried away by the dry breeze along with her exhale. The undercurrent of lean muscle pressed against the inner side of his arm where a slanted trail of beauty marks tucked itself into the crook of his elbow when he propped them onto his knees and pushed back his knotted mane. 

"It makes it harder to hold your breath, I guess?" he slipped a sideway glance at the incoming shadow casted on the sand. "I don't – I mean maybe there's like research about it or behind it, or something, I don't really know that's just kinda my experience." 

In the present time, Eryn often struggles remembering his name – Oscar, Owen. But in the sting of open eyes underwater come seashells of those memories, shrouded by a light veil that, while transparent, feels like condensed air upon the eyes; the scent of board wax from his fingers; Ace deodorant washed off him by ocean water and the coastal breeze; a letterman jacket, always strewn over his yellowed board, with patches of the MLB. It had 'Taylor' in block letters across it's back. Eryn can't say she knows (– or known) that to be his last name. Red and blues in faded leather made her guess it wasn't his to begin with – maybe a hand me down from a parent who's a sports fanatic or simply thrifted. 

But more radiant than those fine details was the way he never seemed to find his footing above land. All appeared to slowed pace in his eyes, even his limbs seemed to drag behind his thoughts. And when in Melina's presence – who Eryn is certain he'd had a crush on otherwise wouldn't have accepted to teach her baby sister to surf all summer for free – seemed to be a rip current he didn't quite know how to get out of and had surrendered to the fact, it wouldn't be unscattered. 

Eryn had gone into the water again, the board too heavy for her to properly tuck under her arm. The tail dragged and scratched a line onto the sand, he winced as seashells crushed under (– and probably scraped) the fin. 

The foam rippled from the lip of the wave, but it hadn't sizzled like spurts down the neck of a shaken coke, as her instructor had tried to illustrate when explaining to her the basics of surfing – it'd been as if the drag of the board across it back was a painful carve and when it broke into itself, the wave rolled its shoulders and she slid of its skin. Underwater, undersea. 

Eryn recalls rushed breaths between the chain of waves that sailed into the little beach after her fall, dragged at her ankle by the board. Eyes glazed with salt, silhouettes were colors in a painter's palette, she couldn't properly discern where each began and ended.  

She'd looked up, regardless of what he'd told her; innate talent for all that can bring death upon us. 

In its grip, Eryn noticed the sky was the sea. A crystalline blue, the faint edges of the unrestful sea lapping against itself could've been curling waves. It'd been a breathtaking sight. Heat burned between her rib cages, the currents inside her boiled at the drag of oxygen's slowed cruise to her lungs. 

Now, sitting with her legs tucked under herself, Eryn Sallow feels distantly like that boy with youth speckled skin and eyes the color of bottled tears sweetened with cotton candy skies – drowning above land. Drowning in words; drowning in silence.