Bruised Water

Some people are born for the surface.
They glitter there.
They skim.
They call that depth because nothing in them
has ever had to survive pressure.

I was made lower.
For the part of the ocean
where light arrives already dead.

A sea anemone fixed to dark rock.
All silk fringe and startled nerve,
all flower-body and sting,
opening only where the water
was honest enough to crush.

People see bloom and think harmless.
They see softness and think simple.
They see a thing rooted in one place
and assume it has never known violence.
But I was never made for fleeing.
I was made to fasten myself
to one dark thing and live there,
to feel every shift in current
as prophecy.

It took something rare to find me.
Most never came low enough.
Most loved only my weather,
the bright trembling edge of me,
never the body in full,
never the pressure-built animal underneath.

Then the shark.

God, I loved her immediately.
She was the first thing I had seen
move through my depth like it belonged there.
Not afraid of the black water.
Not embarrassed by appetite.
All white underbelly and verdict,
all force, all grace,
the beauty of something
that can split a life open
without mistaking itself for cruel.

I thought: finally.
Something made for the same darkness.
I thought: this must be what it means
to be met.

What I meant was
I had never been found like that before.
What I meant was
I confused recognition with mercy.

She bit anyway.

First the circling.
The beautiful menace of return.
The way a shark can make the whole body
feel chosen before it feels doomed.
The thrill of being the one soft thing in the trench
something powerful keeps coming back for.

Then the tearing.

Blocked.
Unblocked.
Called back toward the wound.
Promises spoken with another woman’s name
still wet in the teeth.
Ride or die said like a prayer
while betrayal moved beneath it
slick as a fin.
The humiliation of being touched again
only to learn it was hunger
returning to the same bright injury.

But the ocean says it prettier.

She came at me in black water
and left ribbons.
Left my bloom ragged.
Left silk tentacles torn and drifting
like party streamers after a shipwreck.
Left the water around me reddening so slowly
it looked, for a moment, like dawn
had fallen all the way to the trench.

After that, everything in me changed religion.

I stopped believing in beauty
that moved toward me.
I learned to close before contact.
I learned that once something has found you
soft and rooted and unable to run,
love begins to resemble surveillance.
I learned to call fear intuition
because it sounded holier that way.

And then you.

Black coral.

Branching.
Private.
Austere at first glance,
until the current caught you
and there it was,
a little mane of amber at the edges,
gold threaded through lacquer-dark limbs
like the deep had kept one aristocratic secret
and given it your shape.

You were not the kind of beautiful
that asks to be understood.
You were the kind that survives
and lets other people misname it.
A reef mistaken for ornament.
A living thing mistaken for hardness.

You should have been safer than a mouth.
But the body does not care about technicalities
once it has been blooded.

I looked at your branches
and thought teeth.
Looked at your shadow
and thought here it comes again.
Looked at the gold moving through you
and thought lure.

As if every beautiful thing in the deep
must be hiding a jaw.

Maybe you were only a rare thing
growing quietly beside me in the trench,
and I was only another wounded animal
misreading the water.

But I know this much:
I could have rooted near you.
I could have learned your shape
without bleeding for it.
I could have let something dark exist beside me
without making it wear the shark’s face.

Instead I ran in the only direction
my kind can run.
I closed.
I cinched every bright filament inward.
I called it caution.
I called it timing, distance, circumstance,
whatever clean, dry word might keep me
from naming the real thing:
terror.

Not of you.
Of what had already happened to me.

That is the ugliest part.
Not that I loved the shark.
Not even that she tore me.
The ugliest part is what came after,
how thoroughly I let her rewrite
my idea of the deep.
How I took one set of teeth
and built a whole theology from them.

Now when I think of you
I think of black coral lit at the edges,
something regal and unspectacular,
something dark that had never once
come to feed.
And I think of myself lower down,
still sea anemone,
still fastening my flower-body
to whatever stone will have me,
still trying to separate
memory from prophecy,
the shark from everything that came after.

Somewhere in the trench
there is still a version of me
opening beside you.
No blood in the water.
No red silk drifting from my body.
Just a sea anemone and black coral
making one dark, impossible garden
out of pressure.

But here is what I know now,
too late and still learning:

a reef is not a mouth.
a reef is not a mouth.
a reef is not a mouth.

And not every creature
that reaches your depth
has come to devour you.