Sharks
The inner battle of self-abandonment vs. self-preservation while navigating the urge to reach out to someone who has previously dismantled you.
As I prepare to enter the shark-infested waters I ponder: Am I dumb or am I brave? Or is it this other third thing that I don’t want to acknowledge: that I want to be bitten.
Because flesh and muscle being torn from bone means she’s choosing me. My mother has teeth just like her.
I lower my body from the dock, white caps slapping against my goosebump-coated thighs. I pause briefly as a seagull floats down next to me. With a side eye, he mutters, “She’ll sink her teeth into just about anything.” I hiss at him. He taunts: “Just last week I saw her chew up a spare tire.”
Ignoring him, I smother my parts with chum and sink into the icy depths, waiting. The seagull shakes his head.
Finally, her fin pierces the water’s surface and she guns it toward me.
See? It’s me she wants.
I’m not asking where she swam off to while I was sleeping, because right now, she’s feeding on me and only me. As she mounts me, I cry out. No animal has ever sunk her teeth into me this deeply, and I’ll tell you one thing: it sure as shit feels better than no teeth at all.
“She’s an opportunistic feeder,” offers the seagull. I plug my ears, knowing sharks attacking humans is a rare act.
See? It’s me she wants.
I surrender to the thrashing until the water turns purple around us. She spits out bits of my flesh before swimming off again. The seagull delights. “She prefers sea lions.”
Days pass and my open wounds crust over. Lightening up, the seagull gives me a salve which offers temporary reprieve. Under his watchful eye I ask myself why I want to be palatable to such a creature. The sun exposes me.
She wants me, right?
The seagull dares me wait on the dock, insisting that her arrival without my explicit invitation will be the ultimate test of her devotion. I begrudgingly agree. My limbs hang by a thread as I squint toward the horizon, but there is no sign of her. My wounds heal slowly and I cry and cry and cry and cry.
Even the seagull abandons me. “Pathetic,” he mutters.
Leaving these familiar shores for higher land I wonder whether a softer touch would even register as love after her.
Operating on faith and a partial need not to disappoint the seagull, I collect my tattered clothes and start to walk away.
An hour into the journey, I turn back one last time and make out something stirring in the distance. The seagull eyes me with one brow cocked. “Don’t!” He squawks .
I begin to sprint. My scabs reopen, integrity splattering onto the sand. My old chum bucket still contains a few scraps. I dump them over my head as I cannon ball into the murky waters once more.
Because some lessons need to be learned the hard way.