There is one Ocean on this Earth and it has fifty daughters and they can come and go wherever they please. Every one of Ocean's daughters have offspring uncountable and I know none of their names. But one of them was calling me out of my wood, to the very edge of the rocky land I knew as well as my own heart. The Ocean's fifty daughters are called the Nerieds or so you may have heard. Their father Nereus was named after them, or so it is said. I do know know; I never listen to remember. But I do listen; one of Ocean's great grand-daughters was calling me with a voice [myriad eq. 10,000 years - how old is the Bay? ... about 200 million years old. daughter of an ice dragon and fire giant perhaps sister/daughter of the north mountain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundy_Basin ] tens of thousands of years old or more. So much more I imagine, or I would, if I could imagine time like that. But I cannot.
My own life is as long and as short as I can manage. And I only just barely manage that much. But I can hear my name on her breath. She is the spirit of the water that gets captured in this most cunning of Selena's nets. And just as she is drawn in each day and night she draws me to herself now.
"Don't go silly!" chides the icewater at my feet even as it dances over rocks, falling over itself, unable to resist the same call. "Stay away from her! She will devour you. She will take everything and you'll be nothing, and forgotten, and she won't even remember." It is my little river lover whispering, jealous, of course, but of whom?
"Listen to yourself" I tease back, silencing her. Perhaps she is ashamed to be so like me when compared to her. Or perhaps she is busy, listenning to herself. Her own watery song is a tinkling melody, thin and lilting and utterly overwhelmed by the thundrous bass booming out of the Bay. We both fall silent then, no time to worry at eachother as we both follow the call to our doom.
The brook bed pools one last time before the edge of the cliff. It is a sharp and jagged edge of rock that juts out from the woods an looms over the rocky shore below. Heedless the little brook runs, tumbling over, out of the shade now in full sunlight. She spills out in a stream of her life fluid, her breath her heart. Her waters smash upon outcropped rocks all the way down. She is atomised and billowing out from the cliff face in irriscent mist and in that mist I see her body again, but only in a shimmering semi-congruent form flickering in the eternal chaos of unbeing. Her eyes are wide, her mouth opens in a laugh or a cry or a silent scream. I cannot tell. I cannot stop to think of her because I must go too.
I leap into the air with her and forget until my barefoot loses contact with my land, my earth, my home, that without a link to my tree I am no longer immortal. But how could I remember a think like that at a time like this. There is a beautiful pang to this freefall.
I see pale white bones on the rocks below. The wood of trees like my own, long since lured, to their own ends. Bleached and forgotten, beached, nameless. Did they once grown in my own woods, did they fall, like me, for Her? Or perhaps they washed up here after years in Her embrace, drained of every drop of their own souls and left to drift aimlessly unowned, unknown, unloved till a cleft of rock catches them and binds them to shore for a time.
I fall, for another second, and think again was this the river's warning? Was she trying to tell me that I am not like her and I cannot survive the call of her who lured us both? The Brook is, though little, at least like her - a spirit of water, not earth, not bound to the land as I am to my tree. Perhaps I have made a terrible mistake. But it does not matter. I cannot know, and not knowing I cannot care, nor can I fear. I can only feel.
The breath of the Bay buffets the soft flesh of my body before I break upon the rocks. But even as I break, I feel. My tree has known injury and so I knew pain before, small hurts, seasonal shedding of light hearted leaves. Eachone like a precious child to me torn away so soon left a tiny scar. Sometimes limbs torn away in storms or by careless beasts. Even human children, merciless and indescriminate in their loving, tore and twisted our branches or gouged our bark with dull blades and bruised our bark in play or cold curiousity. But never have I felt this utter and all-encompasing excuciation. Never have I felt a pain that replaces all other sense and unminds me. No longer am I the dryad, daughter of gods, the ethereal spirit of a tree immaculate and intouchable. Now I am a broken woman on the brine-embittered jagged rocks strewn beneath the stern basalt cliffs. I bleed like any poor mortal, alone and longing for my root, trunk, and limb.
My face is wet, something salty on my tongue? Am I crying? Never have I ever... but no. This little dribbling spring is almost black, it is blood, not tears, not sweet sap that stains my lip but the metal tang of human life slipping between the awful shrieking wounds I've opened up all over. Blackness fills both orbits of my eyes and now I want to cry. No I must see the Sun once more before I do whatever tree's spirits do when splintered on a shore. Do I die? I will never know. I press the stones just as I pushed my last lover off of me, but the shore does not move. Instead my wrist snaps, loud and sharp, like a poplar bough shivered by an early spring ice storm. It's a wretched sound. Now I finally know how to cry. Now my tears flow and mix with red and my face is flooded. So cold. So deep. Deep? How do my tears pile up so high, I feel them cresting over my head I feel. No. That is not me. Those are not tears filling my ears and lifting me and tumbling me over. It is Her. And over. The terrible touch of Her thousand thousand limbs and her lips and fingers and Her endless waves. And up and off the rocks. I fly, no float into her embrace. All the awful openings in my body invite her in.
"Hush"
"I wasn't even saying anything"
"She hears you even so." My head is throbbing with a thousand thousand voices. Deafenning whispers, echoing moans, the voices of all her other lovers absorbed dissolved and resolved. In solution. We are not ourselves anymore. Only Her. And although there was no negotiation, that is not to say there is no communication. She listens to us and at the same time speaks through us. Is this what is like to fall in love with infinity I wonder and I hear laughing.
"Little one let me hear you" she speaks to me even as she moves through me with impunity. How long have I drifted in her embrace? I am a tiny toy, no not even, a spec of what once was alive upon her surface. She tosses me into the air