My legs feel stretched and beaten like exhausted dough. I can feel my heartbeat pulsing in my knees, casting blood to the wounds and blisters tickled with salt water on my palms. My sopping hair is matted to my skull, and engulfed within it, there is red eelgrass so intricately entangled that it feels rooted in my scalp. I have been surfing for six hours and my body is weeping, but I am happy. This is home. It is late September in New England– the sun has set early, the moon is high, and the air is cold. I treat autumn evenings like summer afternoons– to extend my time with the ocean, to be alone with it, and in many ways, to become it. Barefoot, I trudge towards the sidewalk with a damp wetsuit peeled to my waist and a purposeless towel slung around my neck. I begin making my way home on foot– my dad does not want me shedding sand in the truck. The sky has gloomed to twilight, and I am cold, aching, and alone. But with seaweed for hair and saltwater in my veins, I feel whole. Who I am here is my paragon.
I believe in being the ocean. I spent years loathing the resemblance I bear to it. I am moody, I am complicated, I can be cold and lawless. Some days, my consciousness feels like a ravenous sea too laborious to tread. Waves are loud, storms are violent, and tides change quickly. But the sea does not apologize for its depth. It does not censor its storms or its rising and falling, it does not beg to be touched by those who cannot swim. It is relentless, it is unapologetic. But it is vast, and it is whole.
I believe in being water– honest and limpid, yet deep and layered. I believe in keeping open arms on many shores, inviting others in but never bending to fit their shapes. I believe in reaching to the sky and floating among the clouds, but always knowing my place on earth.
I believe in being coral– composing structure and grounding from nothing but my own matter. Being resilient, yet beautifully fragile.
I believe in being a jellyfish– rolling with the bends of time, knowing that it is possible to travel alone but to always remain moved by the breath of something bigger than myself.
I believe in being the tides, being simultaneous senses of adventure and respite– remembering that there will always be someone out there willing to surf my storms.
I believe in becoming the ocean. I believe in learning to carry wildness and peace in concert. I believe in housing the births and deaths of fragments of myself each day. I believe in rounding the jagged edges of broken glass. I believe in ever-evolving, yet remaining steadfast, being a home.
The ocean has beaten me raw. I have scars on my knees, blisters on my hands, and permanent knots in my hair, but each autumn evening I come back to it. I am the sea. I am moody, I am complicated, I can be cold and lawless. But at the end of each day, I return to myself—every part of me. The furious crashing waves, the brilliant reefs, the sunlight and the midnight zones alike. I believe in embracing the ocean within—relentlessly, unapologetically, and wholly.