“Ashore”

She's a machine between the sea and sky, and sometimes she still misses her body. The small fragments of her first life that she can remember leak every so often into her consciousness. The man she sweat next to in her bed the night she came to take up her space here, below the sky, she remembers little pieces of him. His fingers clenched and released as they nervously talked before going to bed. He made quiet noises as he dreamed, and she watched the light on her ceiling change. She rolled over and over in her bed on the last night of her first life. His being there shook her, as the noisy heater in the corner steamed away, and she tried to sleep. The end of her previous life felt like falling asleep under the wet pillow of small sounds coming from the man. She felt calm and at a great hight in what she thought was a dream. The air was cool, and as she left her body forever and became something separate, she could feel it raining, suddenly, all over her.

While she still believed she was dreaming she thought she was the wind. She tried to kick with her legs but there were no limbs for the thought to grip around. She worried, and willed herself to move toward the surface of the water, but realized she was only an apparatus of sense. It was only much later that she could barely feel a push from above, and more from below and knew that she was somehow distinguishable from the sky.

With only the slightest touches of memory, only this man who was a stranger, she knows now that she is alone here. She moves at certain times, or, rather, is moved. Sometimes she is over land, sometimes close to the ground. Most of the time she hovers high above the ocean. When she is close enough to the ground she can hear life's movements: people talking, machinery, and other animals. She has long since stopped trying to get any reaction, mouthless, but with a singular purpose. She knows that if she wasn't here the sky would be no different from what was below. Her only purpose is as a matterless presence here, only preventing collapse, keeping separate. And she continues, here, below the sky: a spaceholder.

Sometimes she misses touching and being touched, but it's hard to imagine fingers when you exist as only a space. She wonders if the grey ocean and angry ceiling of the world more closely resemble lovers or enemies. She can't remember the difference between those two kinds of physicality. The only touch she remembers is the sex like a slow tide that she had with a man she didn't know very well in a room that was overhot. The two of them sweat onto one another without significance as the silver heater clanked away in the corner, letting off jets of steam every so often into a room that smelled of the cheap candles that she had lit to try and give a sense of importance to the night.

She knows, now, that she is a purpose only, not a person: a specific separation. She spends most of her time over the sea, looking down. She's exists as part of the machine between the sky and everything below, and is unable to remember herself enough to know how lonely she is. If she could remember more than her last night, that last disappointing man, if she could touch sometime beyond that, to where she was a whole person with a past, then she would be able to differentiate between her own tears and the occasional rains that are one of the few things able to pass from the sky to the ground below.