She lives on the edge, or so they say. I know for a fact that she doesn't, she slips out through the corners and then slides back in, disappearing momentarily until she has something new to say.
I met Marine at the age of sixteen. My country song filled world was being vignetted by early punk rock of the 2000s. I remember sitting on my windows XP, with that infamous Autumn Background as wallpaper, getting one or two CDs per year to listen to The Killers or The Cure.
I had never been a rocker. I preferred the soft, melody of a familiar country song to the incoherent shouting of a rock one. But maybe it was because I had never experienced the emotions these rock songs were trying to convey.
Maybe I had never experienced the helplessness, the anger and the hopeless that would make me believe that the only way out was having someone else speak your truth. That the only silence was in 2 mins and 30 seconds of this incoherent shouting. It might have seemed like shouting to me at the time because the language seemed almost foreign.
I had never experienced being "Mr. Brightside" or "Human".
But that summer, my life was burdened with worries that had seemed to fade into the blue of the distance till then. With the loss of my grandmother and the prospect of higher education drawing closer and closer, I found myself feeling powerless and hopeless.
So, I pressed play and I discovered the scary, exhilarating unknown of the Rock.
A part of that scary, exhilarating unknown was Marine.
She lived in the house next to mine. Though until sixteen years of my life, she had been an unknown bird faded in the background of a sky full of birds.
That summer, suddenly she became the sole point of focus.
I was listening to The Cure on a mp3 player I had borrowed from my elder brother, when she hopped the fence next door and sealed our fate.
To say Marine was beautiful would be an understatement. She was the kind of beauty everyone wanted to possess. Not possess in the sense that they wanted it to be theirs, but to own like an object. Though luck didn't favour them because Marine was brave and unrelenting.
Marine had a pale face tinted by the rosiness of youth. Her cheekbones were high, almost aristocratic. Her eyes were the blue of chlorine-filled swimming pools penetrated by diffused sunlight. Her hair were the blonde of sunrises, almost blinding in their beauty. Her body was petite and seemingly perfect, she seemed perfect even. But what seems is not what often is.
"The music called me." She announced and sat down next to me on the fading green grass as if I had known her all my life.
I looked at her, puzzled and she must have noticed because she said "I'm Marine".
And my first thought was that she could be. She did seem like a mermaid fresh out of the sea, a siren in this unknown territory, a peacock with his wings outspread looking as if it was clad in the sea itself with a thousand shades of different colours.
"I'm Valentine." I said, wishing for the hundredth time that my mom wasn't obsessed with the holiday and hadn't named me that.
I expected Marine to question this or laugh at this but she did neither. She nodded as if she had accepted this undisputed truth and lay down in the grass. She closed her eyes and listened to the music.
I am sure that the music was very familiar to her because it seemed like her head was dancing along with the beat. Her head bobbed back and forth at just the right moment and with her eyes closed, it looked like a strange form of meditation. Like she was disappearing into the ethereal depths of the sea of her origins.
