soft and sinking
I feel my feet cementing and I grip to my lifelong wonder.
In the radiating warmth of confinement, this damp hole could be home
if I were brave enough to hold my breath
as the tide rolls in.
maybe then, in my hollow sandstone column
I’d be freed by the trickling salt water
I imagine now,
the water pooling at my calves
a hermit crab
dancing on its needle-like claws
spins around my legs.
I wonder if it was mere fate, or if by some sea-bound twist of luck
he has come to watch me turn outside in
I chuckled at the thought of the crab spiralling in the swell of my column
Where unlike me, once filled,
the crab could simply float out of this silty predicament.
As the sun began to set the water reached my hips,
the horizon looked like the inside of a clam,
and I wondered if perhaps I was being eaten alive.
the rose from the water’s edge bled into gold and canary yellow
a light blue deepened into the saddest shade of indigo as I looked at the sky above.
Polaris shone in her favourite place
and for a moment, I felt tears well behind my eyes
as I accepted that this was the last time she would greet me.
The moon began to rise as the water reached my ribcage
I could no longer see the hermit crab, who perhaps by now had burrowed to freedom
The repeated pull and retreat of the water
had finely fissured the walls of my column,
instability spread like lightning claps down the sandstone sides
and I felt as if I were surrounded by a pulsing net
with the water now at my collar bone, the now patterned sand structure softened and began to fold
I closed my eyes and existed within myself as I never had before,
accepting my senses as truth, and riding the current of what it had to reveal to me.
the anticipation
the lightningous filaments
diluted in the soup of the sea:
all had calmed now that it was whole once more.
I am told, from where I cannot say,
that the nights that followed the resident hermit crabs had all abandoned their shells.
A young boy took a home in his hand and noted, with great curiosity, the gold fissures that spread throughout the inside of the shell. He returned the strange home to the sand, where it was engulfed by the earth,
as things are in the vastness of the sea.
Chloe Fouilloux 