10-25-2021, 02:46 PM
It is quiet beneath the waves, quiet but for the way the water breathes around her. She can feel it in the sway of tides and changing currents, like a chest that rises and falls in quiet perpetuity, a body too large to fathom and entirely too vast to know. But she’s always known that the ocean is a living thing, because it is something that lives inside her, too. Something that makes her ache and want and hurt. Something she belongs too, and yet something that she remains at odds with.
Dissonance.
She is dissonance.
She feels like she is the compromise of two halves of different wholes come together. There is the mare, and there is the selkie. One an identity, the other a part of her and yet not, a skin she wears beneath the surface of the water to feel like she belongs. It is easy to forget that the selkie is a second skin when she is lost beneath the waves, exploring the deep and the dark and the places so few eyes ever see. It is easy to forget that it is a borrowed body, that it is something she sheds. Something that could be taken from her.
Alleria does not know for certain, but she guesses that it is different for those who shift their own bodies into other shapes, that there is less disconnect when the form is not a physical thing that can be taken from you. She remembers what it had felt like when the sun fell out of the sky and apex predators had filled her oceans. She had been cut off from her selkie, cut off from half of her own heart. Cut off from freedom. It made this part of her something vulnerable, something easily broken when she would rather be impervious and made of stone, pale and cold and unyielding as quartz.
The evolution of this distrust means that less and less often she returns to the ocean, unwilling and unable to draw attention to her skin or to the place she hides it in - and though she can still wander the deeper valleys and ridges of these underwater places in this equine body, it does not allow her all the same freedoms of the selkie.
There are moments, very much like this one, where she wonders what it would be like if she never left these shallows. If the blue water became her blue skies, the reef formations like mountains hidden away in the deep below with valleys between them like paths for her to explore. There are predators in deeper waters, places where it is gray or nearly black instead of blue, places where the sun cannot reach her to warm these silver dapples in beams of refractive light. But it is relatively safe in these shallows, the place as much an in-between as she is.
But habit takes her from below the waves and to the shore, leaves her standing in white sand that must be eons worth of silent erosion. Bone, shell, stone, all of it reduced to something infinitesimally small. She thinks there might be sand inside her too, inside the hollow of her chest or the bottoms of those mountain sky blue eyes. She is certain this is what erosion feels like.
The wind is cold, tangling in the nearly white curls of sea-soaked mane against her pale grey neck. It dries the ends first and they lift from her like silk, like colorless flame. There is a sound, something indistinct, and though a single ear flicks back out of reflex, those glass blue eyes remain moored to the view of the waves she just climbed out of. Moored to the place that is and isn’t home, a place that ever holds her at an arm's reach.
When she does finally turn to that sound, it is with a mask of beautiful indifference, eyes that remember the shade of perfect, bored amusement. But there is nothing inside her chest, nothing but open space and blowing wind, nothing but erosion. And as those luminous eyes find those of the stranger, there is a flicker of that sorrow, just a moment where the mask slips and beneath it is a glimpse of the weight she is drowning beneath. Whatever illusion she had been about to weave with the residue of her selkie voice is gone, tethered to a mouth that does nothing but freeze in an instant of beautiful emptiness.
Dissonance.
She is dissonance.
She feels like she is the compromise of two halves of different wholes come together. There is the mare, and there is the selkie. One an identity, the other a part of her and yet not, a skin she wears beneath the surface of the water to feel like she belongs. It is easy to forget that the selkie is a second skin when she is lost beneath the waves, exploring the deep and the dark and the places so few eyes ever see. It is easy to forget that it is a borrowed body, that it is something she sheds. Something that could be taken from her.
Alleria does not know for certain, but she guesses that it is different for those who shift their own bodies into other shapes, that there is less disconnect when the form is not a physical thing that can be taken from you. She remembers what it had felt like when the sun fell out of the sky and apex predators had filled her oceans. She had been cut off from her selkie, cut off from half of her own heart. Cut off from freedom. It made this part of her something vulnerable, something easily broken when she would rather be impervious and made of stone, pale and cold and unyielding as quartz.
The evolution of this distrust means that less and less often she returns to the ocean, unwilling and unable to draw attention to her skin or to the place she hides it in - and though she can still wander the deeper valleys and ridges of these underwater places in this equine body, it does not allow her all the same freedoms of the selkie.
There are moments, very much like this one, where she wonders what it would be like if she never left these shallows. If the blue water became her blue skies, the reef formations like mountains hidden away in the deep below with valleys between them like paths for her to explore. There are predators in deeper waters, places where it is gray or nearly black instead of blue, places where the sun cannot reach her to warm these silver dapples in beams of refractive light. But it is relatively safe in these shallows, the place as much an in-between as she is.
But habit takes her from below the waves and to the shore, leaves her standing in white sand that must be eons worth of silent erosion. Bone, shell, stone, all of it reduced to something infinitesimally small. She thinks there might be sand inside her too, inside the hollow of her chest or the bottoms of those mountain sky blue eyes. She is certain this is what erosion feels like.
The wind is cold, tangling in the nearly white curls of sea-soaked mane against her pale grey neck. It dries the ends first and they lift from her like silk, like colorless flame. There is a sound, something indistinct, and though a single ear flicks back out of reflex, those glass blue eyes remain moored to the view of the waves she just climbed out of. Moored to the place that is and isn’t home, a place that ever holds her at an arm's reach.
When she does finally turn to that sound, it is with a mask of beautiful indifference, eyes that remember the shade of perfect, bored amusement. But there is nothing inside her chest, nothing but open space and blowing wind, nothing but erosion. And as those luminous eyes find those of the stranger, there is a flicker of that sorrow, just a moment where the mask slips and beneath it is a glimpse of the weight she is drowning beneath. Whatever illusion she had been about to weave with the residue of her selkie voice is gone, tethered to a mouth that does nothing but freeze in an instant of beautiful emptiness.
alleria
pull me back to shore, i'll never reach my place
@Squirt