Sea Dreams

I dream of water.

Still waters, gushing waters, dark waters, blue waters. A friend of mine tells me the water is meant to represent me. I doubt that. He wears a different ring on each of his fingers. They catch the light of the nearest source when he’s talking and blind you with their colours.

It is a river. A king in a faraway land lets the river loose on a long line of refugees trudging along railway tracks through a green valley. First the water gushes forward over the tracks, and people are screaming. And then there is a silence.

It is beautiful. The bodies float up in the stillness – and the cloudy blue of the calming water when it stops to a still. It is beautiful and breathtaking – and not frightening at all – but it cannot be me.

I’ve seen the ocean as a child. It did not fascinate me as much as the sand did. The waves were beautiful – especially in the monsoon rains – and the colours shifted and changed like some wild monster that could never be tamed. But the sand was magical. It spoke of life – and time – and millions and trillions of aeons, recorded in shifting patterns and consistencies of loose particles. And it touched you and played with you and let you form childlike forms and shapes with its grains – and then when the waves rolled over – it would return to what it always was.

I don’t know where I am.

I see different places – different faces – different times, they swirl together sometimes, as if I’m everywhere at once – and then suddenly, they’re silent. I believe I might be dead, or dying, but I don’t know for sure. Everyone is either dead or dying, and after a point, everything is silent. And dark.

The water is cold. It is not clammy – because it is not moist. That is not a word you can apply to so much water. It is cold, but whole – and endless. I am standing in it up to my waist, and my hair is wet. It clings to my back and sends little spherical drops rolling down my shirt – before they meet the water, and become part of the whole. When there is so much water, it is difficult to believe in it. It isn’t water anymore – it’s everything – it cannot be named – because it is there. Like the air, which we have grown so used to, which we disregard so completely although it is always there – between people, between emotions, between moments.

The sun rises beneath the water – and I can see it sparkling through the depths. The bent light quivers, like it has stories to tell, and a quiet warmth spreads through the blue.

Sometimes the water is everywhere – and we must never wear shoes. Wet feet are not uncomfortable beneath the surface. They dance like they’ve never danced before, kissing the currents, swirling through the abyss. Even meeting people becomes a dance. Conversations are slow – because time is slower in the water – and everything stretches itself out, like it’s as important as it should be.

The water is dark and still. A woman’s red and yellow saree is half-submerged in the blackness, and the light changes.
Flowers, just about to sink, just about to disappear – black waters are magical. As things sink, as they fall beneath the surface, they vanish into the dark, like they never existed – or like many more things exist down there – in the depths. A brown ear and some tousled dark hair. More flowers. Two hands, fingers intertwined. Dark fathomless waters. They cannot be me.

I wake in water. Here there are ships. Great masts, towering above, ragged sails that float in the current as if they sail in the wind above the surface. Everything is darker, but still blue. I cannot be the water.

The stones on the rings are bright. They are so bright that they become liquid, sparkling in the light. Grey, green, blue, black – little oceans. Sometimes they expand into complete worlds, surrounding me – and sometimes they are just stones. Liquid stones. Small drops of water.

I am not small – not so small that I can be worn on fingers – quivering drops of liquid bound to metal circlets. Water can be restrained – in stones, in vessels, in eyes. Not all water is wild, although it wants to be. No, it does not want to be wild – it wants to return to the ocean. To be whole. To not be little drops, little rivers, little ponds and lakes and collections in glasses and buckets and tanks. But to be whole – to be everywhere – to be at peace. Perhaps the ocean heaves in yearning – and the rivers runs in hurry, while little ponds and bucketfuls and glassfuls are still because they know they will never see the ocean.
Sand is at home everywhere. In the wind, before a storm, in your eyes, under your boots, inside pockets of people who have been to the beach. I cannot be the water.

I never drown.

My friend says I cannot drown within myself – but I have. And yet the water does not drown me. It shifts – black, grey, green, blue – but it seems to know me – not always as one of its own, as one who belongs with it – but it knows me. I am not one person – no one is, so the water cannot be one thing to me.

Now there is only water. The furniture is floating – the papers dance in the currents – and the sound is deafening – because there is so much of it.

I don’t know where I am. There are people here with me. They are floating too – they are floating like the furniture floats. They do not dance, they stare. I cannot tell if they are dead – or sleeping – because the water is colder than they are. Ten fingers with ten different rings glint in the dark, catching some obscure light from some source I cannot see.

The water is deafening because it is silent. And still. It has drowned everyone in its shifting changing depths, slowed time, slowed life and slowed death. It cannot be me. But I have brought it here.

Sand is most at home in water.