I have seen her only once—if that short word is not too shallow to contain the event—seen her in the violet haze of an evening tide, rising not from the sea but through it, as though she had been stitched to the ocean floor and only now unpicked herself, one limb at a time, each motion a slow denial of gravity and god. She was not beautiful in the way sailors speak of mermaids when too long at sea, nor was she monstrous in the fashion of deep-sea fables. She was something else, encrusted with the relics of silence, glistening with the detritus of devotion. The barnacles did not cling; they adorned. Her skin was kissed not by air but by salt and shadow. Tentacles—not coiled, not flailing, but draped, like fine gloves—moved with an elegance that made me ashamed to blink. And I, fool that I am, did not flee. I did not pray.
I watched.
In watching, I fell.
She moved without purpose, which is to say, she moved without need. There was no hunt in her gaze, no lure in her form. She did not offer herself as bait, as story, as salvation. Her presence was not invitation—it was consequence. The sea had made her, yes, but more than that, it had kept her. Fed her on the marrow of shipwrecks, clothed her in the remnants of drowned superstition. Where her collarbone should have ended, there sprouted a frill of soft algae, breathing with the tide. Her fingers were long, jointed strangely, their junctures webbed with a faint membrane that shimmered like oil in starlight. Where others might see deformity, I saw the perfection of some forgotten Maker’s design.
No sailor speaks of her. Not even the drunk ones who claim to have kissed the sea, to have committed foul acts with those who may be her kin. I have searched for them. Asked in harbours where the wind carries secrets and and the reek of rotten fish. Nothing. Perhaps no eyes but mine have known her shape, and perhaps that is right. I am not chosen, only marked. Scarred not by encounter, but by its absence. It is the not-seeing again that burns, the not-finding, the wondering if I dreamed her into being or if I was merely borrowed for a moment by something too old to understand ownership.
I cannot sleep on still nights. The silence reminds me of her. The pull beneath reminds me of what I did not touch. I go walking when the tide is low, though I know she does not return for longing. The barnacles on the rocks glint like tiny teeth in the moonlight, and sometimes, when the wind falls just so, I swear I hear them grinding.
I do not dream of her as a man dreams of women, as I did when I was younger. That part of me—whatever it once was—sank years ago. I have known love in the human sense. A warm hand, a shared bed, words exchanged in the half-light before the morning intrudes. That life is long since scattered—ashes in the garden of a home that no longer answers to my name. But this is different. This is not longing as people know it. This is a gravity of the soul, something deeper than want and colder than daylight memory. She is not the shape of a wife. She is the shape of silence made visible.
I walk the shore now, not in hope, but in hunger and loss. The village thinks it quaint, the old man who tends the same stretch of coastline, picking his way through drift and flotsam, muttering sea-lore to children who no longer believe in anything they can’t sell or drink. I let them think what they want. Their laughter rolls off me like mist off the dunes. They have not seen her. If they had, they would not laugh. Or if they did, it would be the brittle kind, the laugh of the condemned when they see the noose and pretend it’s a necklace.
I do not speak of her to anyone. Not because I cannot, but because I do not wish to lessen her with explanation. She does not belong in language. There are no right words for what it means to behold something that belongs entirely to the dark and yet makes you feel illuminated. The sea has always taken things from men; wives, health, lives. She is the only thing it has ever given me.
Sometimes I wonder if she was real. I catalog the event again and again, as a priest might repeat a failed miracle in his mind. But every time, I return to the same truth: it is not the memory that binds me, but what it awoke. I was not seeking her. I had given up seeking anything. My days had become repetition, the dull rhythm of decline. She broke that rhythm. And in doing so, reminded me what it was to feel unfinished.
She wore barnacles like pearls—not for decoration, but as declaration. As if to say: I have been under long enough for the ocean to leave its mark, and I wear that mark without shame. How many years had passed beneath the waves for her to become what I saw? And what, precisely, had she shed along the way? Her eyes were deep and unhurried. I do not say they were kind, but they were absent of malice. That, in itself, felt like grace.
It would be easier, perhaps, if I had seen her again. If she returned once a year like a migrating thing. If there was a pattern to it. A calendar I could etch in salt and apply to the tide. But there is no return. Only memory. Only erosion. She passed through my life the way the moon passes through the sky—seen, and then gone, but always dragging the sea behind her.
I am not mad, yet I yearn for madness’s comforts. Not yet though; I feel its draw, I know the feel of that slope beneath my feet. I know the edges of the contentment that will come from letting go of clocks, of language, of the names of things. I keep my journals. I write the same phrases over and over. I draw her outline from memory until my hand trembles. I dream sometimes that I walk into the sea and am not swallowed but received. That she is waiting just beyond the shelf, barnacled arms open, not in embrace, but in recognition.
In welcome.
Perhaps one day, I will go far enough in that the tide decides to hold me. Not out of malice, not even love. Simply because I no longer belong on land.
Until then, I watch the water.
Until then, I wait.