Penelope Libertine, District Four

( N A M E ) Penelope Calypso Libertine
( N I C K N A M E S ) Pen
( G E N D E R ) Female
( A G E ) Sixteen
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District Four

Is it dropsy
Will your lungs swell
It's depressing me
To see you
Struggle

( H I S T O R Y )

I have the same dream every night.

With a rush, the tide sings me past the rocky shore until the ocean swallows me up in its salt-hewn mouth, a great and undeniable leviathan of The Unknown. Its teeth are ancient and covered in moss older than any soul could hope to touch, my fingers slipping across the soft tendrils with the kind of foolishly useless persistence that only youth can possess. Sometimes I find a momentary handhold, tangled in the green, but then the mighty current of the sea comes for me as though I am a siren daughter of sweet rebellion gone astray, gathering me up in its infinite arms and tugging me forever away, away, away...

Come, child —

Tumbling in the dark, I become trapped in my own freedom. There are no laws of gravity or voices to tell me no, girl, don't, just the softly swishing lullaby of movement as my limbs twist with the kind of fluid grace that reminds me I am dreaming. Suspended in the water, I tread and tread, even though I know things would be just the same if I were to let go and release myself completely to the ocean's mercy. However, this is my one defiance. There is no surface to swim to; when air escapes out my lungs — I always try to hold it in, because I know it is the last thing I have that is mine — and past my lips, the bubbles are not pulled up and away. No, they dance around me torturously, teasing me as they mimic my own lack of direction.

There is always the sense that I am waiting for something that isn't coming. Dressed in gauze or silk, the fabric swirls around me with a suffocating promise. Sometimes it is a wedding dress, as though I am the bride of the sea, damned to an arranged marriage of unfathomable importance. The white lace billows around me, begging the water to take my hand in a language I do not fully understand, because I only remember how to float beneath the distant waves. Senseless and serene with terror or tragedy or maybe even just a little bit of lonely triumph, I don't know. I used to wake screaming, but that was an awful lot of effort to fight the inevitable with. The water comes for me and I surrender to it, because the choice has never been mine.

I don't expect that anything will ever come for me in those solitary depths of nothingness, so I simply allow the current to curl itself around me. Curiosity is easily defeated by the passage of empty time; what once seemed so wretched and strange is now simply the land of night. I've always known that the moon held command over the tide and this is more than proof enough of that. I don't believe in the Sandman or Nod, in Heaven or Hell. No. There is only the ocean.

Exactly why I am bound to an eternal rest beneath the heavy blanket of its salt water, I couldn't say. Each morning, I wake sputtering against the early sunlight, once I've held my sleepy breath for too many of the night's endless hours and can't stop my greedy lungs from attempting to swallow the ocean up just the same as it did to me. It is an infinite cycle as the water and I take turns devouring one another. Perhaps we are both waiting... or searching. If this is a game of finding, the ocean must be winning. I feel it heavy in my belly as I walk through the streets, solid ground awkward beneath my seafarer feet. Here, the omnipotent sea hitches a ride on the breeze, surrounding me with a perpetual gale of salty breath that sings a chantey song of summoning. Oh, Penelope, are you filled with air — swallowed oxygen that made you float up? Is it dropsy? Will your lungs swell? It's depressing me to see you struggle.

Confusion nags at me as its muddled whispers crawl into my ears, begging me to come to its shore with words of worry, as though the ocean misses me when I am not there, despite how it neglects me when I am adrift each night. No, girl — need you there, need you there, need you there. I resist when I can, but find myself pacing across the sand all too often, barefoot, as the waves lap up to kiss my toes. Oh, release that air. The promise that perhaps today I am not waiting for nothing hangs heavy in the space that separates us, until I no longer know who the true siren daughter is. Echoes ring persistently in my ears — come, para mi corazon — and there are days when I have to press my hands to my ears and scream to block out the temptation to jump in. However, my terrible cries sound altogether too much like the pleading voice hidden within the wind and I can never fully shut the words out: "For my heart."

Those are the nights when sleep comes too easily, as I slip beneath the tide of my dreams before I've even finished gathering the sheets up under my chin. Fear and dread have been carried away by a lulling cradle of waves; I feel only the familiarity now — and a frustrating indecision whenever I try to dig a little deeper into my own emotions. The ocean's depths are not exactly a pleasant place to be caged, where gravity and all of existence become meekly irrelevant, but the water has made a home of me anyway, filling up all the empty places in my chest until I'm either growing or choking. Maybe that's okay. After all, I've been drowning for sixteen years and I haven't died yet.

I'm treading water with my oars
Glass galleons anchored, ocean's floor
I'm diving down with all my gear
In search of treasure
Para me corazon

( P E R S O N A L I T Y )

Drowning is when the sea becomes the sky. It is the moment within which I discover that I have floated too high, body lost to the thinning atmosphere as all the oxygen I used to find life in begins to disappear and I —

I wake coughing against the morning sun as it comes filtering in through the flimsy curtains draped across my bedroom windows. They are as pale and ethereal in this light as my water-bound wedding dress, when my feet hover somewhere above the ocean's floor, finding another kind of footing in its stead. My throat seizes with the kind of invisible violence that used to send my fingers scratching at my own skin, decorating it with pretty red lines as I attempted to claw away my attacker with all the fight my sleepy soul could muster. However, resistance is something I've outgrown these days, so although my hands are tangled up in my sheets, knuckles ghost-white as they coil into fists, they remain at my sides — discontent, but passive. Lungs heaving in one greedy breath after another, I count the inhalations to distract myself from the way the air tears its way down my windpipe with a rough and merciless type of desperation.

One. It is morning. Squinting at my ever-brightening windows, I twist against the dawn, uncertain if I'm trying to turn my writhing body towards it or away. Two. Penelope? Pen— These blurred boundaries of consciousness are always difficult, unknown things to me and I often have to remind myself who I am, because what I am is a girl who is being pulled in two opposing directions until there isn't a single fragment of my being that feels at peace. Three. Yes, you girl, with the pockets full of stones. Everything is pressing in, with a weight that is almost unbearable, almost enough to push me back beneath the haze of sleep. Four. Time to swallow the sea. Lips parting with a gasp, my lungs finally remember how to fill their empty spaces properly, but the inhalation feels heavier than it should, laced with the ever-present brine of the District's air. Five. Carry it. This thought is redundant, because I can't really help but do so; this is a command, not a pleading request.

The ocean sloshes — in my head, in my heart, in my soul — as I force myself out of bed. It is thick and undulating, singing nausea's name as though calling out sweet nothings to a wayward lover. When my feet find the floor, soles pressed into the wood for stability until they begin to hurt (muscle, bone, and skin all crushed together), I push with persistence and go stumbling out into the hallway. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. I don't stop until I've flung the bathroom door open and thrown my body into one of its walls, sliding down until I am huddled on the tiles below me. All of the surfaces in this room are as glassy, smooth, and unforgiving as the ocean that haunts my dreams. Wrapping my arms around my belly and resting my cheek against the cool metal ledge of the bathtub, I swallow awkwardly in an attempt to convince my insides to quit contemplating rebellion. That never seems to work. A dry wretch tries to pull my stomach into my skull, so I curl forward with a jolt as I begin to heave, keeping my head tucked between my knees while staring at the ground, mind numb and hollowed out into vacancy.

These are the mornings I hate the most, when something within me tries to insist that I should fight back and rid myself of the things I keep secreted away within the deep of me that are too big for my tiny body to hold onto properly. That is a foolish hope and, yet, it is one that is not so easily shaken out. It sends my hand on a mission, groping the edges of a loose tile at the base of the wall I'm hunched up against, until it pops loose and clatters to the floor with the sound of victory. Nestled among the pipes it concealed is a small box of matches and I begin to tremble as I pull one out, striking it with a spark that flares up to say, oh! Good bad morning, Penelope. I was wondering when I'd see you again. It's been a while. I missed you.

I shrink when confronted with the flame, aware that it is a direct contradiction to everything I am, but continue to draw it close anyway, eyelashes fluttering against the tiny source of warmth. Leaning into it, I inhale the thin tendrils of smoke that spiral up as the wooden stick is burnt away, a single, persistent piece of knowledge turning itself over and over in my mind: When you boil water, it dissipates into the air. My other hand rises up to hover over the miniature blaze, close enough for the flesh of my palm to flush bright pink as the skin begins to feel as though it's being pulled taut and peeled away by a devil sprung from an unspeakable fire of eternal damnation. Then it is gone. Gritting my teeth, there is a part of me that wants to pull away and blow the fire out before it can burn me any further, but that piece of me shares a voice with the ocean, so I pay it no heed and instead choose to allow a pathetic whimper to eke out my mouth like a battle cry of determination. Vanished. Departed. Away... and so shall be the water within me.

Strangers might describe me as "calm" and go on to explain how I seem to drift casually through life, as though I were a goldfish swimming circles around my tiny castle, content to go 'round and 'round forever. Maybe there's some truth in that. In the noontime hours of daylight, the sun often warms the sea of my soul into a serene stillness... but I daydream of the storm. I want the sun to come so much closer, until it boils the water within me all away or at least sends me tumbling in the kind of motion that knows how to traverse distance and send sailors to the far off, forgotten places where the lost live. Perhaps the ocean's absence would remind me of what it means to be in over my head. I might wish it back, but I'll never know until I feel emptiness for the first time.

If one child can carry the sea within them, maybe another can carry the sun. I want to know them and hold myself against their warmth until it burns and hurts, the ocean finally howling in my ears to stop, Penelope, stop. I won't stop, no, not until the water is all gone, its execution ringing in my ears with the last death rattle gasp of a fallen god. That moment will certainly take its turn haunting me, but I promise not to mind it. How could I? I will wake with one steady breath after another, laughing into my sheets as the sun and I share a smile that is completely without envy or resentment. The memories between us may be cruel ones, but it will have given me empty places within myself to fill with whatever I choose.

Take you to the forest
Let you feel the raindrops falling down
Seeping through your red scales
Eliminate the faucet, eliminate the need for water
Replace it with a safe shell

( A P P E A R A N C E )

Someday I will live in a house made of glass whale bones. When the night comes, the dark will bring a deep and unbroken blackness with it, until morning arrives and the light refracts through the walls to set them ablaze with an endless and blinding white. There will be no more uncertainty as to which piece of the day is reaching out to possess me. If ever I find myself upon the beach once more, after my feet have carried me into the world, I will discover that I am looking out upon an infinite graveyard. Sand stretching in all directions and the distant coral reefs — dried out and dead — jutting into the air with outstretched arms, as if begging for salvation from the apocalypse that the sun and I have wrought upon them, I know regret will come for me.

I can picture that moment all too clearly within my mind, as if the ocean itself planted it there, a seed of guilt warning me to douse my matches and hopes before I bring about the end. Yet, I will still stand strong and with enough pride that I will not look away from the destruction. The shore will be a desert beneath my toes and the wind will whip through my sun-bleached hair, slipping between the strands with ease now that there are no remnants of salt lingering in the air to bind them into tangles. Then, for a heavy moment, I will remember.

Under the water, I was always darker and yet somehow also brighter. My pale skin was ethereal beneath the waves, bringing something down, down, forever down into the depths of the ocean, and whatever it was that I carried into the deep was undeniably foreign. Despite the constant of the dream, I have always been a kind of perpetual otherness. However, it is not just me — it has never been just me — and so I recognize that it's not the water that changes me, but rather that the water and I change together. Light and color become fickle creatures when all of us gather, as though we were old and silently bickering friends. The sea is suddenly denser and I—

I always became as deep as the ocean, each twist of my fragile limbs some kind of attempt to grow. It is no trick of my daydreaming mind that my hair turns itself into a bold, auburn flame when I am immersed; even when the bottomless water seduces my soul, swaying me into a shallow kind of compliance... that spark of sun-begging defiance never goes out. So perhaps I began to tarnish with a slow rot of color or contradiction and that's why my hair has been darkening over the years, not just in my unconscious delirium, but in my day-walker existence as well: little girl blonde turning grown girl dirty. It has been yanked on by gravity — past my shoulders, to my elbows, towards my hips — and sent drifting, weightless and yet feeling just as heavy as the entire world. Indecision has invaded nearly every fiber of my being and this hellfire halo, half-burnt to ashes, is proof enough.

There is one constant, however. The straight and narrow bridge of my nose could be smashed in easily and the same half-hearted punch could cause my thin upper lip to swell up and become a twin to the lower half of my mouth. Delicate jawlines can be rearranged or a fringe of dark eyelashes snipped away, but within the boundaries of District Four, there is nothing that can change the color of my eyes. The water has stained them. They are blue. Blue like an untamable riptide. Blue like the crest of a wave. Blue like the first time you dive under and open your eyes before you break the surface. The edges are so inky as to be inescapable — it's difficult to avoid following in the footsteps of the familiar — while pale enough to promise a little hint of something that is the opposite of lost... just enough to be dangerous. Even standing on this corpse of a shore, in the alternate existence of my own mind, I can still see a distant ship with flickering lights and it is fixated on me. It yearns for both the aqua and the marine of my eyes; it hears my zephyr-breath hum of mourning and cannot resist the siren song of my dream-ancestors.

"Come, sailor, let me sing you to the rocky shore." My ragged whisper ricochets off the emptiness, flinging itself into forever and rebounding back, bearing a ghost's memory that beats its fists against my ear drums: Oh, Penelope. It's depressing me to see you struggle. Squeezing my eyes closed, for a moment I lose myself in selfishness, throwing a foot-stamping, childish whining, fit of personal pity. The water was begging me to banish it; I've done no wrong. Ceasing the fervent shaking of my head, I peek out at the horizon and the ship that is determined to come for me, as though I am buried treasure for the New World. "Soon we'll both be feeling the crush."

It's not until the tears (of what I mistakenly believed to be regret) begin to prick at my eyes that I realize my mistake, as well as the complete and utter inadequacy of the sun's efforts. Indeed, we have done no wrong, because we have done nothing. You forget too easily, Penelope, the water has always been in you. Such thoughts are more than a simple piece of truth as the blue — like a whirlpool, like the reflection of a hurricane sky, like high tide — comes leaking out my eyes, twin torrents that stream down my cheeks and puddle at my feet. That old, familiar sound comes choking out my throat as my attempt at breathing hitches against the salty droplets that invade my mouth with every hiccup. Sixteen years. At first I attempt to brush the tears away, but they are stubborn and unyielding, and soon I'm clawing at my own throat, desperate and contrite with failure. I have been drowning for sixteen years — The flood of blue is rushing out of me too quickly to even dream of stopping it and soon enough it overtakes me. — and I haven't died yet. Then, with a pull from the eternal deep, I am tugged under.

Don't wanna see you floating upside down
On the top of the bowl
When I
Come round to visit you
Don't wanna see you floating upside down

( C O D E W O R D ) Odair
( F A C E C L A I M ) Marcelina Sowa

No, girl
Need you there
Need you there
Need you there
Oh, release that air

( C O M M E N T S / O T H E R )

Penelope by Pinback

I'm treading water with my oars
Glass galleons anchored, ocean's floor
I'm diving down with all my gear
In search of treasure
Para mi corazon

( O T H E R S P E A K I N G ) B6DD99
( T H I N K I N G ) 7CB894
( T E X T ) 438682
( O T H E R ) 315469
( S P E A K I N G ) 464E60

Take you to the forest
Let you feel the raindrops falling down
Seeping through your red scales
Eliminate the faucet, eliminate the need for water
Replace it with a safe shell