The Girl Who Walked on Water

      Once there was a girl who walked upon the water.

      For years she'd sat upon the lonely deserted sands of the shoreline, gazing unfocused into the sea before her, a great and flat expanse, moving and unmoving, the waves growing tall, reaching their apex, and crashing back down in upon themselves under their own weight, so that even with such great and mighty fluctuations, the eternal ocean itself largely retained its basic shape. A long flat plane stretching out into infinity, its expanse so immense that these mighty waves were as nothing by comparison, and the body as a whole remained intact with its surges.

      Vast. Mighty. Powerful.

      It was hypnotic by its very nature, the complete opposite of all other life, and it mesmerized her. Its message spoke to her in a deep and profound way, it addressed the things that the men and women around her brushed aside, and it didn't always succeed in answering them, but it didn't need to.

      She felt as though it filled an empty vessel inside of her, and whether or not its briny substance was a satisfying conclusion, it was more than the people who surrounded her could offer, their vessels being cracked altogether, and largely useless, in a way that saddened her deeply, abandoning her in loneliness.

      Still, though, as she gazed out into the distance of the neverending sea, the thing felt elusive.

      It became hazy as it stretched beyond the horizon.

      There was only so much she could glean of it from the shoreline, like a lighthouse whose beam only penetrates so far out into the thick black fog of night.

      There had to be something more for her out there.

      She watched as fledgling sea turtles broke loose from the prisons of their shells, deposited in this exact swath of beach, covered with the same sacred sands as thousands of generations before them.

      She watched as they hobbled across the soft wet shore, battered mercilessly by the tides, gushing into them, scraping them backwards to the point from which they started, only to commence again from the beginning, again and again and again and again, making sure that no creature unworthy of residing therein should be allowed to enter, because the sea, for all its deceptive gentility, is a harrowing place, and if you can't even make it past the front door, there's not even a glimmer of a chance that you'll survive once you make it out into its murky and unprotected depths.

      But eventually, they all make it.

      Every last one of them.

      And the girl followed them.

      Her feet sunk beneath her in the wet sand, and she knew that if she did not take the first step now, she would be swallowed up by this shoreline, trapped in an environment without nourishment.

      She surprised herself with how easy it was.

      She pressed a toe into the formidable green sea.

      She did not fall through.

      She planted the palm of her foot down, and still she did not sink.

      The water could support her, where even the solid sands of the beach could not.

      She pressed the other foot down, and she stood upon the water.

      It was unnerving at first, bobbing like this on the waves, and she didn't know exactly what kept her standing upright, what kept her from falling down and being rolled across the top of the water, as she was sure would be the case if the land itself were to begin to tumble around like this beneath her.

      But then she remembered the constancy of the sea, that even as it broke up and dissolved and reshaped, it never really changed, and it stabilized her.

      And no more did she falter.

      With a deep breath, she stepped out.

      She walked into the sea.

      She walked, and walked, and she kept on going, and the great waves roaring overhead did not deter her.

      She looked back, and she could not see the land.

      She felt a wave of anxiety begin to accumulate inside her, but she turned and kept going.

      The waters continued to roar around her, as she continued to trek for miles on end, in a journey whose end she could not possibly predict.

      She found a small island.

      It was a lovely little thing, and she settled there, drying herself off after being drenched by so much ocean water, and lying on her back, staring up at the moon that was a driving force that made it all happen, and shutting her eyes.

      She heard the steady roar in her ears, and it took away any last vestiges of anxiety still plaguing her.

      She drifted gently away, everything finally making sense, her mind finally at peace.

      The days went by.

      She lived in her thoughts, and things made more and more sense.

      The world made sense.

      The ocean made it make sense.

      It didn't make sense, but she felt a great emptiness wash over her.

      She stood up from the ground, and surveyed the tiny island. Ten steps in any direction and she would be back in the water again. The only other life a single palm tree shooting up out of the middle.

      It felt like the loneliest place in the world.

      Lonelier, even, than the shore. Lonelier than being surrounded by people with whom she didn't connect, and lonelier than having to watch the thing for which she longed from afar.

      At last, she had reached that so desperately longed-for thing, but she had done so on her own, and now she was completely and utterly alone.

      She didn't know what to do.

      She was scarcely even aware of it as she moved across the island, as though it was steering her body toward the water.

      She dipped her toe into the water, and once again proceeded to press the flat sole of her foot down into the sea.

      It broke through the surface.

      She gasped, and thought her heart would fly out of her as she crashed beneath the waterline, lunging face forward into the ocean, the saltwater pouring into her lungs, her arms and legs tearing through the brine as she struggled back to the shore of her tiny fleck of land, until at last she made it, and she rolled over on her back, her wet dress clinging to the surface of her skin, and she panted furiously, the gulps of water spurting out from her throat, and the strands of her hair plastered tight against her head.

      She couldn't believe it.

      She lay there for some time, shivering, from both the cold and what she feared to be the implications of her plunge, and she tried to rest, but she knew she couldn't rest while this knowledge was hanging over her.

      She did her best to let her body recover, and she rose back up, sitting at first, staring at the water, and then all the way back up to her feet.

      She walked the couple of paces it took to get back to the shoreline.

      She stared at it, challenging the water with her gaze.

      Carefully this time, she pressed her foot back into the water.

      Once again, it slid straight through.

      She pulled her foot back, feeling numb.

      She was trapped.

      Stranded on a desert island of her own choosing.

      She started to cry.

      She curled herself up into a ball, and laid down upon the sand.

      She drifted away with serene emptiness into her sorrows.

      She began to try and think of ways she could escape.

      She could build a fire, but with what? Who would see it? Who would come to her rescue once and if they did see it? Why should someone go out of their way to help her, when she had so readily abandoned them all?

      She could write a message in a bottle, she could toss it into the ocean, and she could pray to whatever was out there for its safe arrival on the opposite shore. But she didn't have a bottle, and she didn't have anything to write on, and she didn't have anything to write with, and she didn't know where to tell them they could find her, and she didn't particularly have anything much she wanted to say to whoever got the message, anyway.

      She could swim.

      She looked out across the vast, fearsome expanse of the water.

      She wasn't going to swim.

      She wasn't going to do anything.

      No options presented themselves to her, and the fact that returning would feel like coming back home to an empty house after a funeral did little to encourage her efforts.

      She sighed, and she thought.

      She'd been foolish to walk out like this.

      To strand herself, to become lost without hope in her desertion.

      She had imagined herself, rising above something.

      But what?

      She'd striven for clarity, and all she'd gotten was loneliness, because the truth is a very lonely thing.

      The something she'd risen above she'd arrogantly assumed most others to spend their lives blinded by, and in most cases blinded to. But now she knew that that isn't the case.

      Whatever she thought she was rising above, she'd come to realize she'd been running from it, and rising above it only in the sense of ejecting herself from reality.

      The ones who rise above it, she realized, are the ones who confront that abstract whatever-it-is. They don't wallow in it as she had when she'd been unable to withstand it, and they hadn't run away from it as she had elected to do in place of confrontation. They realize it, they acknowledge the emptiness, and they find ways to survive it. They live their lives, they tell themselves that they love, they distract themselves in order to make it through the day, but the fact remains that they do survive it, and they do it without marooning themselves from everything in their weakness.

      And that was all she was.

      A fugitive marooned by her own escape.

      How dared she think she was somehow above them all for thinking she saw something that they hadn't?

      How dared she run from the thing that all men are called to confront?

      All men are destroyed by it in the end, and they must accept it, or else it will destroy them all the sooner in their resistance.

      How hadn't she known that?

      How had she thought she could resist?

      How had she truly believed that she could walk upon the water?

      She didn't believe that anymore, and now that she saw the reality of herself for what she was, she felt herself lose the strength of what it had been that had allowed her her delusions.

      She was not the exception.

      She was proof of the rule.

      And she knew it now.

      She felt weak.

      Weaker than she imagined anyone had ever felt, and she shuddered as she thought that this sort of existential elitism was what had brought her here to begin with.

      She shut off her mind.

      She didn't think of anything.

      She looked up at the cold emptiness of the stars.

      They weren't that beautiful when you knew what they really were.

      It was some time before her reverie was disturbed, and she looked up at the sound of splashing, a greater slap of wave against her island's tiny shore than she'd been expecting to hear.

      It took some strength for her to sit up and inspect it, and so lacking was her willpower that the image swirled around before her eyes for several long seconds, before the thing solidified in her vision, and she numbly took in what would be her carriage back to land.

      With a herculean effort she pulled herself up.

      She stepped into the sea, any illusion of walking onto its surface given up for gone, and she shivered as the cold water rose up to her knees, then her waist, then clear up to her chest, her shoulders just barely sticking out of the water as she neared the open expanse.

      She laced the fingers of both of her hands into the crook of the sea turtle's shell, and she heaved herself up onto it, hugging the sides of its shell with her knees to counteract the buoyancy of the water pushing up against her body.

      Its black eye looked back to her, as though making sure to see she was secure, and she looked back as well, staring sadly at the dashed illusion of her imagined Shangri-La.

      She turned her head back, determined never to face it again.

      Her ferry turned, and it pushed off from the land.

      She felt the gentle cascade of the sea glide past her silkily, as her body went numb from the cold, and she knew there was a chance she might drown before the sea turtle arrived at its unwavering destination along that same patch of sand, but it didn't really matter.

      She closed her eyes.

      Her tears became one with the salty brine of the ocean, as the creature plunged down beneath the unchanging surface of the waves.