text: She was always my friend, and I always hers. I sat out on the pale yellow sand, watching her dance. She delivered to me everything: leather boots, seaweed, shells, unmoving fish. These acts of kindness were unbeknownst to me outside of her shore, and I returned them to her in full with other exotic gifts. Her water was beautiful, teeming with grey and blue and white, and she sang a song of lulling waves. The sun glistened off her rolling surface and when the sun left, moonlight flooded in. She would try to climb up the beach towards me, then retreat backwards, too afraid to venture far from her abode. Every day she would invite me to swim in her infinite depths, to travel out far where the waves were mountains and the froth was snow, and every day I would swim farther and farther out before she worried about my despairing limbs and pushed me back to shore, and then we laughed about it for hours upon hours. Home was not where I belonged, the academy was not where I belonged. In fact, the whole town was infested with a looming sense of despair. Its buildings were uneven and their bricks were stained black. The windows formed hollow eyes, observing passers-by. Following the dark smoke of the chimneys upwards, the eye would reach the foreboding Manor that towered over the crooked rooftops. It sat atop a hill that forms a cliff face over the ocean as if part of the hill had been chopped off and sunk beneath the waves. The academy was an unhappy place crammed into the town’s centre. The ceilings loomed far above and teemed with cobwebs and the stained glass windows refused to let all but the most awful of light in. As I walked the dark passages of the old and horrible school, I questioned how one could ever be happy there. I observed everybody’s smiling faces, but nobody ever saw mine. I nodded to every person I walked past, and they turned their heads from me, not seeing me, I was too short, too skinny, too ghost-like in comparison to the brutes whose bodies attracted the most beautiful forms. My hand was thrown upwards all the time in classes, but I may as well have been throwing up spider silk, never seen by the professors. My home was empty, my mother had died giving birth to me and my father had been sent far away for cracking open the skull of my sister, leaving me all alone at the top of a hill in a birch forest just beyond the town, in a crooked, squalid and mouldy hut. When my loneliness overwhelmed me, I would run to my Ocean and weep. Once, I asked her to speak of her own creation. She told me the Sky was her mother and Death her father. It came as no surprise to me that such a wondrous being was made from the addition of two magnificent others. I stopped with the school nonsense and spent my time with my Ocean, where I was doing something worthwhile, bringing happiness to something so grand and beautiful. On a cold afternoon with wind biting at flesh and wave, she surprised me by visiting in her mortal form. I saw her standing on the pier, and immediately recognised her as my Ocean. Blue eyes, hair as golden as the sand, that familiar scent of salt that she radiated. Every word she spoke reverberated around my head, every step she took glided with the grace of a dolphin yet felt like a whale on my chest, every smile would summon light into the room, banishing all forces of misery and anguish. Each night, she would head to the beach and walk along the shore, staring at the sparkling water under the moonlight, and each night I would sit in the sand dunes and watch her from afar, observing her elegance. Of course, happiness never lasts. She, just as everyone else, had seemed to forget me. She became infatuated with others at school and as the days grew on she became more and more empty. Leaving her sandy home, she had become shallow. I lost her, and she was losing herself. One night, I left the safety of the sand dunes and I approached her, armed with a rope and a syringe filled with seawater, so that I could reintroduce the sea back into her body. She was staring at the sea as she walked, her lips curled into a wistful smile and her white dress billowing in the wind. As my feet crunched the sand beneath, her head snapped from the ocean to me. My eyes locked onto hers and the world seemed stationary for a brief eternity. “I have to take you back,” I told her. “Do I know you?” She stammered. “Once, I suppose.” I could see her jaw twitching. She turned and began quickly walking the other way. I followed, feet crunching the shells beneath me. She broke into a run. Her human form was weak and her legs moved frantically, slowly, ridiculously. I had caught her in an instant, knocking her to the ground. She began kicking, so I picked up a handful of sand and cast it down her throat and into her eyes. Her scream cracked out as a dry cough, sending up dust into the air. She writhed under me, but I had pinned her down. I brought the vial of seawater to her neck and penetrated her with the needle. Her body contorted, twisting and turning like an eddying whirlpool. She stopped moving. I dragged her body to the water and let the waves take her out. I followed, feet kicking at the rocky and dark surface. Now was the time that I should join my beautiful ocean. I had no means of living with her while still in my own fleshy husk. Maybe, instead, her creators could turn me into an immortal being so that I could spend an eternity with her. The Sky was far too high up to hear me and Death was too abstract to convene with. But maybe he wasn’t... No, in fact, he was right here in front of me. I cast myself into the ocean, knowing she would no longer push me back, not while she was recovering. The water filled my throat, nostrils, eyes, seeping through my body as I sunk further and further. Never had I been this deep. I felt my lungs tighten, like tentacles had wrapped around me and contracted. No light penetrated this place. Gone I would be soon. And gone I was; blood stopped visiting my brain, my eyes closed their doors and my heart quit its job. The dark night was filled with the putrid stench of rotting fish. I hated it. Death had ignored my plea to join him and I had washed up on the shore, my heart resuming its morbid task. I went back to my hut, my rotten abode that sat upon that godforsaken hill. The morning came and I was greeted with gloved fists pounding on my door that shook the windows in their sills, yells calling for me to quit my place and admit my guilt. “Even death ignores me” I thought to myself as I moaned on my bed. How rude of Death, to bar entry to those who wish to meet him yet take in those who do not. ... My bones were frail, my form shrunk, my skin stretched thin, I wept in my gloomy cage over the roaring ocean. A perpetual storm lashed at my beautiful ocean, which fought back with white nails of froth. Tears rolled down my grey cheeks as they joined their salty brethren below. Through the teary haze, I spotted a white dress on the ocean surface, encasing a whiter-still body. It was disgusting. A tremendous wave crushed the thing and it was gone. The Ocean was silent. It was just me. Only me.