Alice's Hangover

After a week of blinding sun, there is always this phase of shadows. Everything I see seems to be darkened by a few tinges. It’s nothing, I tell myself, ‘your eyes are tricking you.’ Sometimes my hands shiver, craving for something to hold – a cigarette, a glass of something quick, maybe another hand. It’s always just a phase, I tell myself, a trick of the mind.

Sadly, I am always true.

There was a moment on one sunny day when she drew her red shawl all the way across her legs. Her feet glistened and her face was bent, in wonder of her own beauty. She didn't want to tell me anything so I stayed and watched. It felt like a moment on another sunny day separated by geography and psyche where I felt that all my fears and all those borders were in my mind. She looked and I walked away.

In my heart I was running, farther away, across oceans, beyond familiar faces, in circles, grueling against my own little miseries. My feet were growing tired as the world turned brown and ugly. My world, a lot smaller.

Then I always see the tiny door and a bottle that says, ‘Drink Me!’.

This is the one game I’m never tired of. I’m forever thirsty now, looking for little bottles in the corners of melancholy. Even drops of salvation will do.

By the Bay of Bengal.

A long lost joy clings to me as I watch the Bay of Bengal extend far past the horizon. I hear masochists block oxygen to increase the pleasure. That in death the body reacts exactly like it would when it reaches climax. The sea playfully thrusts itself against me. If the sea carried me away and I screamed as I died and if the people on the shore called out to me, the sea would take away all the drama and quieten everything. I would never give in, I think.

I'd fight like hell, to hide that I've given up (Bright Eyes)

I tell the sea that I just told it a secret but it ignores me, continues reaching out to my knees and going back, a lilt in it's movement. I look around and there's an ugly couple, a lone walker on a mobile phone. The sea does the same to them. I wonder if they are thinking about the cruel death a sea could execute. I walk further in, still happy. I think of all those things that I haven't in months and have missed. I think of his bacon-y smell as he shyly let me curve into his side, my toes embracing his rather large feet. I think of how she spooned me and kissed away the hangover. I think of the rum tickling my insides as the sun lit the beach full of pretty people a few years ago. I remember crying because I was in love. I think of Radiohead and Pink Floyd, Tori Amos and Matchbox 20. I was already a dead woman reliving insignificant (or are they significant now that I know I saved them in my deep conscious) memories. I stand an hour smiling, cramped by the caresses.

I am so jealous of all those born next to the sea who have a better equation with it than me. I've always wanted to love the vastness of the sea. I've tried so hard. It makes me so happy but I can't be standing on it's shore all my life like a stranger. I want it to tell me all its secrets and pour me with sunshine, the way only a sea can. I want the silence it offers to be a joy, not a fear. There's something about death in the sea that scares me. There's something about death in the sea that excites me.