I point my toes like a ballerina and swing my leg back and forth, carving a gentle arc straight into the floor. As I stand out in the open, the wind forces the smell of salt and far-away-lands into my nostrils, pushing the sensation deeper and deeper into my subconscious until when I shut my eyes I can truly believe I’m standing on the edge of nothing. Facing the world, but not close enough to be part of it. In the cemetery, although not quite dead yet.
I can feel my skin being quickly withered by the radiation, the solar rays falling all around me from the crimson sky above, peppering my shoulders with dark marks and turning my cheeks into a reflection of itself. As the land continues to be built up and torn down around me, millions of long-dead bodies constantly being shifted from the sea to land to sea again as the moon drags the tide back across the world, I imagine myself as one of them.
As an empty shell of my former self. Left to bake in the heat, faded from the sun, my imperfections long ago smoothed by the gentle rhythmic lull of the waves. My mundane worries washed away with the currents long ago. My soft, vulnerable body broken down back into the elements it was created from. Returned to the Earth as we all must, as those lying before me here already have been. But as I run my hand back along the gentle arc I’ve made in the floor of tiny shells beneath my feet, gathering a handful of the billions of long ago lost souls who’ve come to rest here I long to see another human face again. The thought that these creatures, the dominating species of this bay on the edge of the world, ended up as just another mass of forgotten souls is pulling me from my need to disappear with them.
I long to be seen again. To flaunt the presence of my soul to those who can still appreciate it. I succumb to the pull of those far-away-lands my mind can sense, those full of music and flesh, those where the tourists who earlier combed this beach must all retire to when the sun goes down. Where they must have gone while I’m left here, the only life in sight.
The beach will lie in wait for me. The ghosts of those shells former lives lingering for another millennium, then another after that, until the people stop coming. Until those far-away lands move too far away. Until there’s no soul left to be buried in the great cemetery here. Until the Earth herself succumbs to the tides of the universe, breaking down into her elements, lost forever beneath the cosmic waves.
