Reflections

COHORT 1

My mother named me Ocean because it’s the only free body to ever exist. On this earth, where land is stolen and sold, the sea is the only body that belongs to everyone. Strangers, shore, ships, seaweed. Water knows no difference. It only grows and grows, expands towards infinity. It lives because it can. It lives beyond all of us. My mother named me Ocean because she hoped I’d grow beyond my limits. Because The water pushes and pulls. It gives and takes. It is all I can ask for. You are all I can give.

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I wake again to the thunder of my heart reminding me I’m alive. There is something relentless about this pulse in my chest. How this Valentine’s day organ is an accomplice to my body’s crime of living. And my alarm clock: the thief who stole enough time to keep me here. It hisses 5 A.M., yesteryear, a decade ago. All of the places I am lost in. All of the histories I try to claw myself out of.

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Monday morning pit stop: the mirror, a Gemini. Bearer of my face and the one I used to wear. I scowl, stick my tongue out, stretch my smile to September. Try on my reflections like costumes. Which one do I look best in? Which one do I escape from?

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The mirror sighs, in relief, for what it can’t feel. What only I can feel as I stare deep into it, deep into myself. My hair, bleached by August. My skin, blued from too many nights stargazing into tomorrow. My eyes, burned pink by the saltwater. I promised her I’d come up for air.

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My heart is a ship I try to jump out of. I wonder how many times I’ll attempt to get lost at sea. To forget the thump, the beating. To remember why she named me Ocean. Why she named me after a living, breathing thing. One whose current swells all around me. Drags me back to shore. Gives me another chance. And I dive right back into it, no hesitation. The waves softening the monster inside of me, I fail to float back up.

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To love this corpse is to remember how it lived before her passing. Or how it pretended to live afterward, I don’t know. Between the burning sea and the glass mirror, I choose the sea. Because all it asks for is a body, not a heart. Because the water can’t tell the difference between the gasping and the drowning and the dying while the mirror can. Because the water doesn’t call for reflection, only drags me in, deeper and deeper. Because the mirror glows with inquiry. It asks and asks while the sea takes before the answer.

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Mother, I am not 

the ocean. I was never

a free thing. Just yours.