Iceland review - 2006, Side 43

If I turned left, I’d lose my sense of direction in the vastness of the concrete
school in front of me. If I turned right, there is only an empty present blocking
my way back home. That is what it is to be a senior in high school. There is
the nothingness, and the other thing that leads to nothingness, no matter how
much you don’t want it to.
But I can sit, and so I do, my ungraceful plop cushioned by a bloody
darkness that has surrounded me since I woke up three years ago. This
education has no luster, so I do not want to learn what I am being taught;
there is no future in leaving school, because there is nowhere yet for me to
go. Only the waiting.
I shift my eyes inconspicuously to the right, towards the ocean.
The waiting. I tense my shoulders, propelled forward slightly by degenerate
thoughts. Years ago, I tried to take hold of my waning enthusiasm for life;
I’ve had more success stopping a puppy from growing. Eventually, I could
only inhale as I watched the thrill of education slip through my fingers. I
refrained from going to class, drawn irresistibly to the neutral shore. It was
the only thing that could properly articulate my metamorphosis. All day, I
waited for that beautiful moment when, upon coming home, I’d drive my
chin into my chest, convincing myself that reality is an afterthought and the
dream is eternal, if only I could fall asleep long enough, deeply enough,
long enough.
I was surprised the afternoon when I realized that I had come to an unspoken
longing for a kind of calm death. My only wish, my fervent prayer to the
melancholy hills surrounding my city, was to sink slowly and deliciously into
the sand, down into the wetness where the ocean continues to pulse and
pulse and pulse in the ground, a reminder that “Your sweat is salty/ I am
why,”* and the silent crush of gravity is an unyielding mercy on old souls.
Why else did my feet always take me to the sea, even if the only thing I have
decided to do is not go to class? Sitting in the sand, I was waiting, I realized,
for a massive Poseidon-arm to reach for me out of the tranquil waters and
draw me, compliant, beneath the surface to the still depths.
I sit, feet in the sand. My fingers rise like steam to my face, covering its
habitual sadness. I curl them slightly, trying to imitate the ribs of a conch shell,
and listen to my thoughts.
Sleep now resembles the suspended moment of a mermaid’s existence,
floating on the ocean floor and living like vines must live on a tree, growing
in a curve of elegance. A mermaid, I mused, is the result of a tired body
embraced by the sea, accepting a life of watery permanence. The present is
the dance of the current around a reef and the piercing song of gray whales.
Sleep, I tell myself, is the closest I can get to this existence. No longer do
I dream in colors unknown in human nature, in violets so hot that they burn
my retina, and blues so wise that I wake to enlightenment. Now, there is
only that leaden gray painted across the back of my eyes. Sleep is my one
defiant gesture against the sullenness of day, but more importantly, it is my
only conduit, outside of the beach, to the radiance of eternal dreaming.
I become aware of salt in my mouth, cold on my face, and beneath the mask
of my fingers, I feel my body’s natural prayer to the ocean. I am still a part of
you, it says. Take me back. Take me back. Take me back.
Where can I go? I ask of the miniature crab skeleton near my feet. Where is
a place to rest? If not the ocean, where?
In a place where there is no purpose to be discovered, it answers. In a place
where nature reigns, and humanity is nullified by the vastness of earth.
A small spider moves slowly into the empty carapace. Watching it, I picture
the earth as a massive sphere, covered with rushing arachnids. In my head,
they scuttle across land and ocean, trailing webs of diamond. One of
them catches my eye, starting from the tip of the earth and crawling lithely
downwards, holding a shining string. The image stops as the spider rests
at the earth’s underside, directly over a mass of ice. <i>Antarctica<p>, I
conclude. A place literally at the end of the world, which cares not for the
grid of man and the brittle name he has bestowed it. I huddle my body
farther into the sand, smiling faintly at the prospect.
I will disappear, I whisper into the crook of my arm to the skeleton by my
feet. I will walk across water, to the snow, submitting to the denizens of frost.
The blizzards will erase all trace of my passage. I will walk and walk, until I
have passed out of the minds of all who ever knew me or whose lives I might
have touched, however briefly. I will walk and history will blink, forgetting
that I ever existed. The surging torrents of ice and snow will swallow me
whole, and still I will walk, waiting for it to happen. I will walk for so long
and far that the tangible parts of me will fail and fall behind, and my soul
will cease to remember them. Despite this shedding of organs and bone, my
soul will not stop walking, going through unimaginable temperatures and
stripped naked by storms, until I am a wraith among the endless whiteness
surrounding me.
Then, and only then, will it happen. I will walk so far that I will exist only as
a starry brightness, an entity with no recollection of another life. Here I will
stop, and raise my phosphorescence to the howling tempest of snow before
me. I will rise and rise, propelled by nature’s insistence, until I hit the celestial
ceiling where the winds attain true form and become an aurora, blue and
purple and violet. For a luminous second I will dance joyfully, in a moment
of nirvana so loud and low that the Buddhists will hear it and wave, until I
will wink out of sight, into the place of transcendence where there is no life
to live, only life itself.
Ideal, says the crab skeleton, startling me out of my reverie. Ideal, but there is
an easier way. Perhaps not so resplendent as Antarctica, but close enough.
Where? I ask it.
The skeleton tells me.
Iceland? I reply.
The skeleton goes on to tell me of the hot springs of Iceland, fueled incessantly
by nature and frequented even in the coldest snows. A frown sidles onto my
lips as I struggle to picture the springs. The skeleton sends me an image of
them from its long-deceased membrane. You can become steam, it whispers
to me. You can become steam.
I am buoyed by the tantalizing words, more than I was even when dreaming
of disintegrating in Antarctica. Steam, it repeats in my ear, lulling me into an
oceanic trance, as the tide creeps further up the beach. The sun falls lower,
and I shiver, caught in my dreams. The skeleton buries itself once more in
the sand, deep, deep down, as the gray waves caress my feet. The sun
leaves without a goodbye, the sky only turning from puddle gray to silver
dusk in its wake. Distantly, I feel the sand give way beneath my body as
the waves dance higher and longer, gathering my breath in arms of foam,
the decomposed remains of mermaids gone, or so I’ve read in The Little
Mermaid, in a time when the world was warmer.
In my sleep, I have found the springs. It takes less than a moment for the
heat to throw me back against the cold blizzard that tries to push me deeper
underground. A smile like water as I lay compressed by the elements. Long
sighs slip into a moan as my skin turns to vapor, and my soul into a school of
fish with moon rays for tails.
AURORA
By Alison Cagle
* Line from “Oceania,” written by Sjón and performed by Björk.
40 ICELAND REVIEW ICELAND REVIEW 41