In order to receive your love, any at all, I’ve thought my body an ocean of which I tried to control. I ignore the moon’s sway, its pull, and the science of it all thinking if I could master this surface— ripples, tides—I would be able to be as tempting as the sea. I would be able to beckon you with a siren song to me. What a dangerous love. Such an unnatural dance. It’s like a myth: Neptune’s daughter falling in love with a land dweller. He knows how much she loves him and entreats her, tricks her to lose her waves so that he can roam a little further and have more land.

Tempting you to come to me for what you need—passage, nourishment, beauty. I contain multitudes. You, in turn, gave me what you can: you turned this ocean into a grave, a place to hold war and pollute. You said it was all for the greater good, and so. I sustained.

I ebb and I flow. I try to tame the aches by begging my flesh not to swell; I demand a grace and sweetness that is unnatural of someone with so much salt in their blood. Perhaps it is the Atlantic in me, but I have developed a rough and savage beauty that I cannot accept because I long to be the Pacific.

It is some great strangeness that no matter how strong or frail I am, it will never be enough. Like the ancient mariner embittered and wizened with knowledge only beget by terrible mistakes, I can say confidently I cannot be contained. Neptune’s daughter learns soon that it’s not the lie that’s worse than her own betrayal of herself. I must let it flow and I must let the waves crash and my body swell— if you live, you live and if you die, it is with great honor that I will know my tides destroyed you without any kindness.

I’ve spent the last few months putting distance between myself and people I love. I didn’t mean to. I meant to keep myself away for long enough to get better, to be change. It’s like writing “LYLAS HAGS” in a yearbook and hoping that somehow, magically, on the first day of summer, you’d be someone no one remembered.

There seems like so much distance that I can’t imagine coming back. I’ve swam miles from the shore and now I’m tired. I want to say I miss or that I will miss you, but I’m not so sure anymore what that statement intends or that it’ll reach you.

It’s strange having so many emotions in a body that’s so big. The only time I feel tiny is when my feelings don’t fit inside my body. Wide and round; this body was made to contain, not maintain. I’m a hoarder. I keep putting things in, but I still feel so empty.

Lately I’ve felt like a rotting apple, and let me tell you, that’s a beautiful thing. I’m an apple someone was saving in case they got hungry, but something better happened, and they forgot about me. I rolled under the car seat and sat there for months, with only darkness for company.

Nevermind. Forget those last two paragraphs. Paragraphs are just another body that I’m trying to forget, I’m trying to rework to fit what I need. I guess the best that I can do is acknowledge that the distance was intended for something that didn’t seem so self-aggrandizing, so selfish. I do love you. I do miss you. I’m tired. I want to go to shore.