Collection of Shorts

The Voice of the Sea

Yesterday, I decided to swear off drinking water. I'm not sure how long this resolution will last, of course, or if it's even my decision to make. Nobody knows about it yet, and I don't plan on telling them. If they need to know, after all, they will find out without my help.

I can't even really tell you why I've done this. Science will tell you water is necessary for survival, because we are fluid beings that cannot survive without what we're made of. And it's not that I don't trust science, not at all. But for whatever reason I'm discounting science, ignoring reports, and simply abstaining from water. Maybe I'll keep on, maybe I won't. Who can say?

Perhaps I'm just not thirsty. Or, I suppose I am, but water doesn't satisfy it, and neither does anything else I've tried. It's like every single time I drink anything the thirst only gets worse, until I'm in a desert, dry and parched. I see an oasis and run to it, hoping to quench this terrible thirst, but bring my hands to my mouth and see it is dry sand; a mirage.

Yet I'm surrounded by water constantly, a fitting fate for a man who lives in an island country. It blurs my surroundings, muffles sounds, and causes me to be isolated from the world. I view it now through a funhouse mirror, twisted and distorted and grinning at me all the while. And yet no one else is affected. Their world is air, clear and pure and unassuming. They can breathe their surroundings, it gives them oxygen, life. I, though, am drowning, slowly choked to death in silence. The irony of it all is that I can't drink any of it; it's seawater that parches me with just a taste. I'm surrounded constantly by water, by an ocean of it, and yet I'll die of dehydration.

I'm no happier now that I've given up water. I still feel things, disappointment, pain, all the negative emotions in this world; they just don't leave my world of water. It's like they all reflect off the walls, remaining inside and over time losing their energy until they fall to the floor and dissipate. I was no happier before I gave it up either, because then I could see the world as it really was, all the distortion the world has on its own that the wall of water corrects.

I read somewhere that drowning is the easiest way to go, because you're unconscious for most of the process. They say it's calm, peaceful; the noise of the outside world is shut out and you go quietly. Quite frankly, I don't think I agree. Maybe because I'm still conscious, and I can feel everything that's happening to me. I'm disconnected, sure, but my senses function within the ocean. I feel the chill of the water soaking through my clothes, I blink saltwater out of my eyes. Drowning, I think, is a slow, lonely death.

Three days later, I've started to sink. If I look down, I can see the bottom of the sea, dark and cold. I haven't passed the twilight zone yet, so I can still see, blurry though it is. I can still hear, too, though it is garbled and difficult to understand. Everyone speaks as though their mouths are filled with cotton, or maybe as if my ears are. Perhaps the water is trying to protect me from the siren song of the outside world, to keep me pure and unaffected by the goings-on of society.

I asked the water why this was happening to me, why I had been so thoroughly encompassed, and she didn't respond (I call the water a she now, because ships are female and so are cars - in fact most if not all vessels are. The water carries me around as I float from day to day, and so the water, I think, is female.). She murmured, as waves do, but though I've spent the past few days - how long has it been? Three days? four? - with her I still do not speak the language of the sea. It is haunting, seeming to tell of all the stories lost within, of all those who rest at the bottom of the sea. And though I said drowning is painful, the language of the sea is oddly calming to me, like a mother's heartbeat to a child.

It cannot drown out the thirst, though. It resonates in me and throbs through my body, sure, but the thirst overpowers even that. Yet regardless of how all-consuming the thirst may be, I can't open my mouth to drink the water that surrounds me. Even if it happened to be drinkable, to somehow be able to quench my thirst, my lips have become so parched that they have dried shut. Dry, even in the sea.

I wonder. If I resumed drinking water, would the sea dilute? Would she, slowly but surely, drain away until there was nothing more than a puddle, then a few drops, then nothing? Would there be rain in my desert, or would there be for once a true oasis that didn't become hot, dry sand the minute I put it to my lips?

Come to think of it, I don't even know if I'd be able to drink, if my lips would even open. I may not have a choice, and perish of dehydration while floating in the sea. Or I may suddenly be inexplicably drawn to a glass of water, then two, then three, and consume gallons in mere minutes. I can't be sure. Maybe it still will not soothe me, parched and dry as I am. After all it hasn't worked so far, even before I gave up on water. The more I drank, the more the ocean around me grew, and the saltier it became. Water could do nothing for me but increase my thirst, and though I tried valiantly to dilute the sea, she refused to be compromised.

My life outside hasn't ended, though, even with my - I don't want to call the water a handicap - condition? No, that sounds like I'm either crazy or chronically ill. Different way of viewing the world, perhaps? In any event, people call to me, talk to me, try to hold a conversation, from outside this funhouse mirror of a world, but I can't really respond. They still speak cotton-mouthed, or maybe I am cotton-eared.

My mouth, too, is full of cotton, the awful fluffy stuff that pulls any remaining moisture out of its surroundings. It seems to be rather selective cotton, though, as it refuses to draw from the water around me and instead sucks my mouth dry. Rather picky, if you ask me. Because of the cotton, or maybe that's only a part of it, it seems, almost, that I've forgotten how to speak, how to communicate, with anyone save for the water. The bold lines of written characters waver, speech distorts; my tongue can't get around the cotton in my mouth and the keys on a laptop move around. Even as I lose my own language, though, hers becomes ever clearer - and yet somehow still calming, soothing.

People have stopped bothering me now: they've decided that trying to talk to me just isn't worth their time. They have work, after all, and can't really be bothered with a guy who can't even speak Japanese anymore. It's quiet, now, without the drone of unintelligible voices and conversations I'm not a part of. Without the constant rush of people, I am now at peace in my ocean, at peace and alone.

Alone, that is, but for the voice, the lullaby language, of the endless sea.

Note:

So if you're wondering why there are all the allusions to Japan (when this is evidently not in Japanese), it's because this was an exercise in copying the writing style of Haruki Murakami (who we studied the year after the bug poem), a Japanese author. So. Yeah.