Sink

I was in Savasana today after a Bikram session that took me far away and deep. I’ve been thinking about you a lot these past few days and while I was lying in that heat, that heat that seems to draw every last memory from my bones to sweat them out from my skin, I thought about you again. You, and then him.

My mind drifted, wondering why it is you who always comes back to me in these moments, and then it drifted out onto an ocean, an expanse of ocean at sunset, calm and warmed by a day of sun. There were boulders to the right and the colour of the sky was a softly brilliant orange mirrored in the lapping midnight blue of the water. Then there were pink flowers on the surface, like frangipani blossoms that might float carelessly about after a celebration or a ritual.

As I saw them bobbing on the waves I realised that they are my memories of you – the good ones that have survived long after the shipwreck of our relationship had sunk deep, deep down in to the waters of my subconscious. And I realised that they too will sink. Slowly, but they will sink. One by one. Frangipani are hardy little flowers and their petals might take long to become waterlogged enough to sink to the seabed. But they will sink. And when they do they will finally disintegrate completely, and my memories of you will be nothing more than salty compost, feeding the tiny filtering creatures of my imagination.

And then I remembered him again and wondered what had happened to his flowers; if they had also succumbed to the ebb and flow of time and tide and sunk in to the depths. I don’t think of him as I do you. So I dived down, down, down to the seabed to see if I could see what had become of his flowers, if there were any remnants of memories, poignant in their determination and fragrance.

Like a flash to the past I saw his flowers succumb to a watery death (like yours are) to the seabed (like yours are) … but instead of disappearing into the sand, they had touched the white-grey grains and promptly grew tentacles, long, searching tentacles that finally found rest as fat anemones, full and solid and inarguably part of my landscape.

Not minute flecks filling space on the seabed, but colourful beasts alive sucking, pulling, inward, inward.