Turritopsis dohrnii
The sea crashes as I drown in reverse.
Salt water explodes from my mouth and nose. The sea crashes as I retch. White foam receeds.
My side is burning and the top of my head. I swat bugs away but it’s seagulls that rise, carrying strips of flesh and hair in their beaks. More hungry gulls surround me, pacing on the sand. Something trickles down my cheek.
I am surrounded by the broken pieces of a ship that is not mine. I do not examine the jagged planks. I dig my fingers into the wet sand and drag myself backwards.
The sand is pale, almost white. Seagrass bends in the wind. The sea is dark and the sky spattered grey watercolour.
The seagulls linger with mock indifference.
On trembling legs I rise and start along the shore.
Each step takes hours, days, eternities.
The sky is too dark to grant me a shadow.
The seagulls follow. Sometimes I turn and scream at them and a few fly away.
I am dying. My cells are dry like grains of sands and I know that eventually I will fall into the sand and be forgotten. It terrifies me. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be forgotten.
The seagulls are coming closer. No doubt they see my shambling gait and take it for what it is. Every time I turn away they edge closer. One of them regards me with one staring eye and I shout at it but it does not fly away. There is a rock in my hand.
The seagull yields to the stone and the suddenness of the violence causes me to laugh. I scuttle towards the lump of dead feathers, seizing them in my hand and holding them high for all the other seagulls to see.
I bite into the bird’s guts.
Afterwards I am very sick. Blood-red puke spills onto the wet sand and is washed away. I can taste feathers. There are cuts in my mouth where the tiny bones cut me as I tore the bird apart with my teeth.
The sandgrass bends in the wind.
How long have I been walking? It doesn’t matter. Each moment here is an eternity and each eternity but a moment.
The weather doesn’t change, nor does the roar of the sea or the circling of the gulls.
Nothing ever changes here except me, and regarding that even I have my doubts.
The wet sand is covered in clear, fist-sized, blobs. I drop to the sand, feeling the wetness of it mould around the shape of me. Turning my head to the side in the manner of the seagulls I stare beyond the gently vibrating membrane of the jellyfish and into the very depths of it.
What I see there are shooting stars and galaxies and brilliant, whorling gasps of energy from which all things are created. It is so beautiful.
I do not know how I find myself in the water. It has almost reached my shoulders. I can feel the pull of it, like the clutching hands of a desperate lover. Not yet done with me, the sea seeks a yet closer embrace.
The beach behind me shimmers with the brilliant sparkling universes that had been washed ashore. I can’t see the gulls any more.
Water splashes across my face and for a moment I am drowning. I turn and try to make my way back to the beach. It is not so much life that I cling to as it is the desire to glimpse another universe within the glistening, prismatic flesh of the jellyfish.
The waves are too strong and I cannot fight them for long. I cannot. I will not.
I can see the shore, awash with stars; the sky, awash with clouds.
I surrender to the inevitability of the sea.
The sea crashes as I drown in reverse.