[From a trip to the sea, fragments of thoughts]

***

If you are feeling energetically heavy on a particular day, it is recommended that you bathe yourself in salt water. It is a simple task. A handful of rock salt (preferably), to be dissolved in a pail of water. The salt bath, an immersion into the sea – yours, your own. There is little fanfare to it.

Step out of the shower, turn in for the night, and fall into the deepest of dreamless sleeps.

The morning will dawn brighter, the heart, lighter.

There is little fanfare to most everyday miracles.

***

There is something to be said about sitting before the sea in the dead of the night. Its playfulness disappears into pitch black. In the distance, there may be light, blinking once, twice, azure, topaz. From a lone ship, or two, moored in the emptiness, keeping watch. If you are lying with your back on the sand, and with your eyes tilted just so, you can fool yourself into thinking they are shooting stars.

In the dead of the night, the sea’s colours cease to be.

The sounds of the sea magnify. When you close your eyes, where the black behind your lids mirrors the black of the outside, the waves begin to crash in crescendos. They rise and fall, and with them, so does the thundering in your chest cavity, where your heart once used to be.

You are not sure if your heart has untethered itself to join the calls of the salt, or is it the other way around? The salt has found its way into your heart.

You open your eyes into the darkness, and you taste the salt on your fingertips, wetness brushing your lids.

In the dead of the night, sitting before the sea in abandonment, is meditation, is grieving, is benediction.

***

“We are going toward the sea. I have swollen. I am carried away. Sometimes at night love comes up so quickly and so high, and if we have no little boat perhaps it is because we want to roll breathless under the ocean floor.”

― Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea

…

Arathi Devandran curates personal experiences, snapshots of the world and the stories people are willing to share with her through prose and poetry www.miffalicious.com