Dancing On My Waterly Grave

by joefromspace

The moon and the stars shed their glorious light, as the two free spirits danced and pranced in their own blissful trance through the motions and emotions of life, bathing amongst the mild waves of the ocean. The warmth they felt from each other's naked bodies was enough to keep them from shivering in the cold water. Their fingers were intertwined, held on tight, as they stared deep into each other's souls, reading each other's minds, silently vowing never to let go. Nothing could ever feel more perfect than that moment they shared.

Her big, beautiful eyes visually embraced his passionate gaze, as if both their lives depended on it. But something else caught his eye. He could barely see what it was, beneath the glow of the moon. Noticing how distracted he seemed, she turned around. There it was, a mere few metres away, a giant gray fin, lurking its way around the lovebirds. Instant panic.

Instinctively, they headed towards the shore. Forget about swimming technique, it was survival mode! Screams. Shouts. Cries. Yet they still held hands, only now with much fiercer grips. The shore seemed a million miles away. It was as though it kept moving further and further away the faster and more frantically they swam.

He turned around for a glimpse of the fearsome beast. It wasn't there. He stopped, panting heavily.

"It's gone," he managed to utter with whatever little amount of breath he had left. She continued crying, desperately struggling to move towards the safety of the shore.

"Babe," he attempted to raise his voice with his near-empty lungs, grabbing hold of her shoulders. "It's gone! Look!"

She held on to his arm and turned. There was no fin in sight. There was nothing but the calm open sea surrounding them. No boats, no witnesses, no fin. The sense of calm started to return.

Out of nowhere, a strong, tenacious pull yanked their feet downwards, plunging them both into the bottomless depths of the dark ocean before they could even scream one last time for the night sky to hear.

That's when he woke up, drenched in a pool of sweat. Evidently, memories of her violent death continued to haunt him even after all these years. Even after he's served his country fighting a war, seeing countless more deaths, each more brutal than the last. Even after watching his brothers in arms die in his very hands. Even after losing his hearing after a major explosion. All that never had an impact on him as great as losing his love to the waterly grave.

He was intelligent - had always been. Nobody needed to tell him that the only way to overcome a certain fear, is to face it head on. Running away, no matter how far, will always prove to be pointless. It didn't matter if he had witnessed a state as sad as the poverty-stricken society of India, or if he had scaled the treacherous deserts of Egypt. Neither did being hunted down by the wild lions in an African safari, nor did staring into the gun barrel of a drug dealer in a dingy neighbourhood in South America. All that travel, all that trouble, didn't matter. He knew what he had to do. He knew he just had to go back into the water. 

It has taken me almost 40 years.

I look far out into the ocean, keeping myself afloat as I hold my breath. Slowly, I immerse my head a little deeper into the water, levelling my eyes with the horizon. There is now nothing between me and the suppositious end of Planet Earth. I feel empowered, as though the rays of the rising Sun have transmitted an abundance of its energy into my seasoned, weathered humanly body. 

The lower half of my face submerged, my eyes wide open. I am one with the water. The Sun. The wind. The clouds. The sky. And this giant fin circling my deathless self. I've never known peace like this.