Ocean Singing Wide and Deep
This feels like something I could expand on, but looking at it right now, I don't know where I would go.
The beach stretches long and flat before her, sand fading into mist, skies grey and cold, and she walks it as she does every day, listening, listening, for the sound of a song beyond the sighing of the surf, for the call that echoes through her, twines around her, ensnaring like kelp, to drag her and bind her forever to the sea.
Wild and briny, the air fills her nose, seeps into her veins, curls around her heart, and she walks in the licking foaming wavelets at the water's edge, cold sandy water caressing and tugging at her feet. She'd hold her skirt up if she cared, but the edge of this one is already so caked with salt, white-laced with it, that there's no point. She walks the verge, balanced, perfectly poised, between land and sea, and listens for the call.
It's a sad song, slow and solemn, deep and endless, restless and yearning, and when she hears it her feet pick up the pace, the rocks black and jagged up ahead, and she winds through their labyrinthine paths until she finds what she's been looking for all this day, and falls into cold, damp, but gentle arms once again.
Skin so pale it seems limned with blue, lips cold and ragged with salt strong enough to choke, webbed fingers running curious over her tanned, warm, dry skin, this becomes her world, and they don't speak, when they're together. She doesn't know if they could. It's enough that she can read thoughts from murky eyes the colour of kelp-beds, that they speak through touch, hands on hands on dry skin quickly becoming cool and damp, moving together over the things they share between them.
Strange barnacle-covered wreckage from the ocean floor, little pieces of corroding metal that might once have been coins, jewelry, doorknobs to show her. She brings flowers and living wood and smooth shining things from the house, and they look at these things together, touching, touching little bits of a world so foreign that neither can fully comprehend what they are seeing, the vision of living blue forget-me-nots strange against the shimmering silvery scales beside her.
She doesn't remember when they first met, when she first heard and answered the call of the sea. It doesn't matter. They don't know each other's names. That doesn't matter either. What matters is the juxtapositioning of brown and blue, kelp and sky, the taste of salt on her lips, strong enough to choke a person if she weren't used to it, used to needing that taste and this person. Salt, like salt.
The rest of the world doesn't matter, here among the labyrinthine rocks at the water's edge, waves sighing and sucking around them, and it's enough that kelp and sky meet and understand, need, and love. It's enough to keep her going until she can return to the rocks once more and touch cold blue skin, murmur their connection with her eyes.
She doesn't remember when she first decided that she didn't belong here, on the land, with these people who know nothing of her, nothing about the sea, rolling wide and green at the bottom of their yards, but it's a thought she holds close in her heart. She knows that the only place they can exist is on the verge. There's no life for her in the ocean depths; it would drown her and destroy her. There's no life for her on the land; air and grass would drown and destroy her, and so they're limited to the border, this thin line between land and sea.
The tidal zone is where it all began, she remembers, where animals first made their move out of the sea and onto land, and she wonders if even now, it is a place of beginnings. Wonders if the move will be climbing up towards the sun, or slipping soundless into blue depths, and thinks in the moment where she tastes salt once again that it was a mistake for humanity to ever leave the sea behind.