She sits here every day like clockwork chiming to the internal rhyme of schoolchildren running out of classrooms for lunchtime. She holds her bag to her chest, her face down, she does not blink as she creates invisible tally marks on her kneecaps. Her hair has grown matted, tangled seaweed and kelp making siren calls to the sailors who think her a pretty face, just lonely. But her body is stoic as the men try to grasp at her mouth, find annoyance in how her eyes reflect nothing but the time, ply her lips open only to frown at the sound of ocean waves crashing into their ships. She simply sits and lets their eyes of brimstone and fingers of harpy turn to thundering palms and gnawing tongues. Closes her eyes to the words that they anchor into her chest, but she is no siren no mermaid that swims. The sea brine and cacophony of thrashing waves echo in her ears as she sits.
She comes like clockwork, hunched back, cold eyes, cold fingertips, no tears left in sight. Still she holds an ocean in her palms, cups them to her cheeks, lets the sea salt scrape away the grime of the day. When her eyes open, there is a brown pool of promises she dreams of that tether her to this seat. When she goes, she takes the taste of sand in mouths, the itch of grains digging into bare feet, the crunch of hair flying wickedly around in a tornado of black, but she does not take the sea. It pools, gurgles, this alcove in a hallway where teenagers playing as adults cry silently and let their child selves roam. She left water to envelope them in moments of breaking, for when the ocean bashes against rocks and carries them to shore. Her fingers erode pebbles, she is felt like the breath of a whisper across one's neck - hovering to press chapped lips into goosebumps. No ocean will claim you. You claim your own ocean, she whispers at night.
But even miles from this mainland, her resolve is a stuttering skipping stone pulled out to sea. A compulsion to a time before, when she held still and let herself turn to foam for his eyes, a time when warmth was a waterlogged bonfire and embers kissing dark spots along her arms. A time cutoff lightning skies into then and now, when she saw how his eyes loved to touch her waters but could not stand not possessing it in his grip.
She creates whirlpools where he once wove stories into her skin, sea urchins litter her fingertips poisonous and ready to inject, her lips coral red and breathing a dying fire. You can almost taste her name, as she becomes more than his faded image could ever be.
for rottenlyrosy because she's every poem made into a reality and then some. and because there is no one who holds more power than those few that can control the ocean, she is infinite.
