Lucía and the Sea (by J()§hØ)

The sun would have bothered the contracted faces since the morning. But only Lucía was there, nobody to see her breaking down at every second. Sitting, trembling, with her face between her knees, Lucía was crying for the coldness of the impossible. She tried to remember who she was, where she came from. Nothing but the pain came to her mind, whiping her thinking. It was impossible for her to think of anything else for more than two seconds. She wondered at which moment the pain had turned into a monotonous routine, the sap that kept her breathing. Would there be life beyond the grains of sand that hurt her eyes?
The sea didn’t talk to her anymore, he just emitted the same unintelligible sounds of always, there was no more feeling nor meaning in them. He knew perfectly that indifference was a mortal dagger, but he didn’t care. He was willing to show her how well he could continue his life without her, and how easy it would be for him to make her fall into his clutches again. Making her feel guilty had become the greatest pleasure for him. The seagulls were his accomplices, overacting every movement, every guffaw, humiliating the poor damsel of sand without respect. He didn’t love anyone else but himself, and he didn’t mind destroying everything that was on his way to get to feel more powerful.
The palm trees by Lucía’s sides were bending in a way that they seemed to be moving away from her. The wind bothered her. The sand hurt her sick skin. Life was becoming unbearable. Her mind was spinning and twisting up, the last bit of reason that could exist in it was dying. It had been a long time already since dignity had packed its things up and gone beyond the sea. Lucía hardly remembered her own name, there was nothing left of her past, no memories of her own existence. She was something else now, a mixture of being and grief, grief and being. She didn’t remember that anything else existed, all she was waiting for was that moment when the sea would mislead her, when he would make her believe again that he loved her, when he would “forgive” her for things she hardly remembered she had done.
She kept a secret in the deepest of herself. But it was impossible to remember when the sea water was continuosly welling up her eyes. Oftentimes, she thought she had a certainty, and then she felt guilty for having even thought about it. But she knew it. She knew the sea’s way to proceed, but she had the fake certainty that she would stop breathing if the tide went out too much. It hurt her not to be able to be water, another drop, a seagull. She needed to be part of the sea again, she couldn’t bear to keep being a strange to the indifferent sound of the waves.
The moment came when she couldn’t stand herself for one more second, she couldn’t stand the spectator sun’s lashes any longer. The palm trees had disappeared and the seagulls laughed at her. The sea kept on torturing her, this time harder than ever, a little bit bored now by his own game. Lucía just couldn’t continue supporting herself.
She desperately tried to stand up, as if life depended on it. Sunken into her own sand, she fearfully impelled herself. In spite of having spent the day sitting, her legs were feeling more tired than ever, as if they’d had to carry a terrible weight. She ran, she tripped, she challenged the wind and the sand. She joined the sea, by force. She felt, relieved, how he purified her skin, how he refreshed her dehydrated pores. She instantaneously went on to feel truly happy, to make an image for herself of who she believed to be. The sea was laughing in his immensity devouring her a bit more, diluting Lucía’s hopes of getting out alive of his trap. The seagulls, hypocritical, camouflaged their feathers, they changed their colors for warmer ones.
The air leaked, and Lucía happily filled her lungs with the salt water that devoured her entrails. She kept on sinking, more and more into her false happiness. She longed for that instant to last forever. Little by little, her sight was becoming cloudy but, even so, she got to distinguish some dark silhouettes which lay hidden in the deepest. Horrified, she saw the floor carpeted with corpses, hundreds of people devoured by the sea, hundreds of wasted souls which had fallen into the trap just like her. And then she remembered who she was and she also understood that it was too late. One second later, the light disappeared.