Sought Lover

Sunlight sprinkled blossoms across the sea. Her feet wriggled into the stones. Only that same morning had Lisa smelt the warm grease of chicken nuggets on the National Express from London. She was home once more to the water that was her soil, the liquid cocoon that had comforted every inch of her growth.

A seagull flew overhead, it mewed and circled. She thought about the time when Adam had asked her to put on a longer dress. (She was standing in front of the hotel mirror. They were on a weekend away in Bristol for a friend’s birthday, summer feelings were in full blaze and she had felt alive until that moment.) How confused it all seemed now as to how exactly, over the four years of their love, she had supressed the wildest part of herself. Where exactly did she disappear to, the Lisa who twisted her spine to Nina Simone, the Lisa who soared? A family were sat eating chips. A crow hopped around them. She had missed that smell of vinegar nostalgia, evenings of long sunsets talking with her bestfriend (another disappearance). A breath... Lisa slipped off her polyester skirt and cobbled a way towards the shoreline.

The water was hers now: in her. And at a breath. Two, three. Tingling extremities and tight lungs. Breathe, it whispered. Tension and… sigh, ten. She had loved Adam – the indescribable cold embrace (and swim) – so deeply to surrender to him too much. Stroke. So fearlessly that she had believed him when he had told her that he knew what was best for her. Head under. Flesh. So quickly to have forgotten all of her truth whilst falling to then again seek it with intent on the crusted pebbles of England’s South Coast. To float, a breast. Her scalp the bitter back gum after toothpaste. She heard the glistening of shingle: the grinding calcium sound in her neck. And then to reach the uncontrollable exhale, the terminating I am so alive breath. To say goodbye for the third time to a fraction of her heart and grow again and swim again and once more accept that she was reborn and that all real love flows on the waves of loss and death. She was alone, on her own count. Eleven. She remerged out from the water and in blue and red pathed skin, Lisa towelled away the salted droplets that reflected the setting sun and watched the longest hairs upon her arms dance in westerly breeze.