The Water Collectors

The tidemark of half a lifetime, when memories of the skin visibly ebb and flow. Looking out at the new sea they realised the body was a vessel for water not its own. They bore witness to a curious vertical divide: the latter half attempting … what? Slate-grey silver and blue-green brown yet to seep into pores, an emergence as escape. Over and over, trying to break from its fraternal twin, then returning to it. Unsuccessful, the water puled like an infant, bent on retting and rotting those who entered what it could not exit, itself. Portal to the black-bordered horizon, one of the many mouths of hell, a convenience of access to those who wished to enter. On, in, or through? No matter. Willing sacrifices, all; hand in hand or else throwing themselves into the relentless crests. The people exorcised a combative echo from their depths, turning headlong into the vast flank of raging foam as if convinced of eventual victory. Their random number dotted the water, each fighting a lone war with the disordered waves. Unified in a distress of flesh and spirit, they also returned. What was the alternative? Hell has forsaken you. Come back to the land and rend the body. Remember the different seas which sit on opposing sides of the rocky hills. One is cacophonous as the other is still. These twins successfully parted, yet no respite or welcome on either shore. Instead, an abandoned ruin to the death oracle of the waters. Armoured by spiked bushes and spiny flora, a testament that to ask is as much a risk as the response. No doubt sailors and dwellers who saw the split seas thought them personalities of its god. Here are violent places cocooned by utter stillness, where the dead have two aspects: the body and its reverberation. One leaves, the other remains. Come back and remember the water that now mingles with yours, what little you offered it when you transgressed. Nearby, another town named for yet another god. War, its sheer landscape of nothingness sculpted from the sand and air of time, whose perpendiculars sow an equally destructive sense of contemplation. The self and the space which surrounds, the tearing of one from another in perpetuity. They knew then it must be the greatest of follies to collect water, a thing whose essence could never be captured or harnessed without extremity. To live, one must understand the rip: of the tide, the flesh, the land, the soul. The collector is only a temporary holder of contradictory terrains.