Cole Adebay - D4 [FIN]

I'm all at sea
Where no-one can bother me
Forgot my roots
If only for a day
Just me and my thoughts sailing far away

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A P P E A R A N C E

Like a warm drink it seeps into my soul
Please just leave me right here on my own
Later on you could spend some time with me
If you want to
All at sea[/i]
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I sleep under a watery skin, throwing stones into my body to make ripples dissipate across my muscles and let the light dance in flickers through my bones. When I am cold, my pale limbs turn an icy blue , and I become the colour of the sea. I could sink into the cool floorboards of my home, light brown hair dispersing around the top of my head with bubbles of oxygen floating to the surface, teasing me. Spindly fingers with smooth nails stretching up to the sky, breaking the ocean surface and sliding against shiny planks of polished oak, bare. feet with the outlines of deep blue veins

[/b] faintly visible underneath sheets of white[/b] padding against their smooth surface. Echoes drift in and out of too-small ears tucked against the sides of my skull,[/b] whispered secrets from the deep kept in-between their openings. I am at one with the water and its clandestine sighs.[/i] And then I float, a small, quiet soul in a small, quiet body, staring up at the heavens with grey-blue eyes that can’t decide whether or not they want to match the sea or the sky.

Still, I continue to float. Clothes billow about my slim figure, slowly turning into seaweed. My neck arches back, as if I was breathing the air through gills, and the world turns upside down for a moment. I spot the reflection line, so perfectly balanced, so calming - and then suddenly, I am submerged again. Water fills my pointed nose, rushes through the holes in my body, and attempts to reach my brain. A chiselled face that lay so still now suddenly alert of danger. My eyes close in an instant, gangly arms thrashing about in pain as it rocks through my head, hammering at my eyes and ears and nose from the inside-out. Eyebrows of mousy-brown twist and contort from a once peaceful veneer to a grimace, thin pink lips spilling open as a cry for help escapes, letting the water gush in and press me further down. Weak little legs tread water, fighting for the air in my lungs. No longer am I light tinges of blue and green – I am thrust into a pit-like blackness. The sea seems calm and the sea seems to be your friend, but underneath lays darkness that not even I can face alone. I am the sky that smiles back at my father on the horizon line as his features do in my reflection, palms stretched across the blue that is the mirror that separates our souls, that traps him on the other side. I will die under here in the darkness like my father did. [/i]

With a gasp, I awake, drenched in a bed that floats on the sea’s glossy surface.

[/color] I am shipwrecked, lost at sea.[/i][/blockquote]


[/i]

P E R S O N A L I T Y

Like a warm drink it seeps into my soul
Please just leave me right here on my own
Later on you could spend some time with me
If you want to, all at sea
Now I need you more than ever[/i]
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Momma said that I was not a creature of the deep, but a delicate petal from a beautiful flower that floats across rivers, streams and lakes, letting the current take it to wherever it needs to be. Good souls surround me, and I must keep the good souls safe. For the sea wants the good souls, the kind ones. Try and try, I attempt to let it take me and give my mother back my father. But it doesn’t want me, the sea. I am not pure enough. I am not kind enough. I am contorted, distorted, carried away not by a current, but by the changing winds that pick up leaves of orange and brown in the fall and dandelion seeds in the spring. They said I was a gentle soul, floating not in the depths of the ocean, nor skimming across the surface; but instead flying high amongst the clouds and the birds. Why swim with the fish when you can soar with the eagles? I am undecided and different and the opposite of everything I am supposed to be.

Quiet, restless, a small smile and soft voice that gets carried away with the wind, washed away by the shore and drowned by thunderous rain. A little timid in places with a fragile glance, best left alone to my own thoughts. Imaginative, if often a little excessive in places, and the tendency to let my imagination wander into places it really shouldn't be stepping its feet into. When a smile, or even a laugh, escapes from my water-filled lungs, my tongue peeps out between my teeth and bubbles of joy float out and burst in front of my face. Or perhaps, in fact, I have it all wrong - and they billow out like smoke, like white clouds that fill the room with fog and condensate the windows. The sky is in my body, in my blood, in my bones. And I am left wondering whether the good is in the sea or the sky, for I am both and neither at the same time.

It all gets a bit much sometimes, and I become trapped like the fish in the thousands of strings that make up the nets in my home. Flailing, flapping, gasping for the comfort of their watery surroundings. Swallowed by the sea, by the air, both pulling at me to do what's right and what's wrong and to stay perfectly balanced between the two, all at once. Perhaps that's why I float so easily - my body is filled with air struggling to break free of the ocean's salty grasp. The sea taunts me with my father's soul and the air beckons me to stretch upwards to where I belong, and for the moment, I'll stay right in the middle until I figure out where I belong. Well all know that secretly, I've made up my mind already.

[/i]

H I S T O R Y

So come and spend some time with me
We will spend it all at sea
Please just leave me right here on my own
Later on you could spend some time with me
If you want to, all at sea[/i]
[/center]

My Momma once told me that when the Earth was created, the sky and the sea were one, split apart from each-other to create balance – air and water. That the sky and sea are both blue because the sea is a reflection of the sky, and the sky is a reflection of the sea, and that that’s why the sky always meets the ocean on the skinny line of the horizon. The world is a mirror. They are two parts, stretched, smiling back at each-other as a person would in a mirror. Identical, so calm and so chaotic at once. Both ever shifting, the sky turning grey from storms and rumbling and the sea from wind and crashing waves. My Momma also told me once that the Gods of the Sky get angry and create lightning, and Gods of the Sea get angry and create tidal waves. And sometimes, they get so angry that the sea needs to make a sacrifice, needs to steal others - good, kind, caring others - away, to calm them down. To swallow good souls and become a still, glass surface once more. The horizon is a reflection, a mirror, revealing the good and the bad. There is a little bit of anger in the sky, and a little bit of calm in the sea. Both with a little bit of themselves merged into the other half. Like ying and yang, there is the sky and the sea. And that’s what sets the sea and the sky apart. The sky didn’t steal my father.

I remember when I was young, he crafted me a toy boat of the finest materials. How much joy I found in that toy boat was undeniable, for I would spend hours watching it sail across my bathtub, the shores, the creeks and rivers that swum around every nook and cranny of this District. I was a pirate, a sailor, an adventurer, all in one day. Travelling down oceans and fighting off bandits, throwing the bad-guys overboard or making them walk the plank. Swimming down to the bottomless sands and collecting shiny pearls and riding on the backs of whales. The boat looked just like his, and I was just like him. Off on my own adventures, the hero of my bedtime stories. I'd crouch against the sandy shores, only 3 feet tall, and push my little sail boat over the shallow depths ever so carefully as my father prepared his own.

It glided so smoothly, so perfectly, and when a wave swept it over and tried to carry my prize possession away I would cry until my mother - with her kind eyes and caring arms - would scoop me up in one arm and my boat in the other and place it in my own until I stopped crying. Slippery syllables couldn't quite believe that I was alright, that my boat was alright, and was mine once more. Years drifted in and out, as did reapings, and I didn't cry like I did as a boy until she was unable to pluck my father back from the ocean so easily as a little wooden boat. I always knew that the ocean was a thief, but never thought he'd steal something, someone, away from me. And I began to put my doubts in the ocean, in my place in it. Because I'm not a thief. I'm a bird.

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