I would like to tell her, Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.

Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems II: 1976-1986

You take my head in your steady palm, push me gently below the surface; oceanic waves envelop me. Of course I cannot breathe, but I submit so willingly, drown so blissfully, surrounded by the rhythms of the sea. Memory and motion, a slow-moving cadence, my mouth seeks solace in that clandestine hollow where your hips meet the inner curve of your thighs. All around me, perfect stillness: I can hear your sighs above the water.

I am a living thing. I have lungs, a pulse, please understand: I cannot always remain beneath the surface for so long. I could only ever lay waste to what I am, kneeling breathless at the bottom of the sea; and yet, to hear those sighing, shifting waves I might have stayed a lifetime longer. I might have submitted to the ebb and flow of desires that were not my own. I might have surrendered entirely the dignity of my being, left my life and my name and my consciousness in the keeping of those waters.

Know now, and always, that this would have been done not for your pleasure, but for my own deliverance. It was wonderful, just once, not to exercise ownership over my private self. To be simultaneously desirous and subdued. When I surrendered to that current, to those tides, I was released, if only for an instant, from all of my grief and maddening solitude, from the discordant history of this slowly dying body. I only existed where the waters touched me. I was simply the surface of my skin.

I frighten myself sometimes. For all of my violent impulses and narcissistic desires, I am still so very gentle: a raw and open wound. I do not think that I am suffering, but perhaps I have been this way for too long to be sure. When I awoke, there were bruises on my knees, and I knew that my own fingernails left those imprints on my heels. This was subjugation, reduction to a purpose, the nature of which did not satiate that nameless need for convalescence that I practice and retain. Even so, I welcomed it. I had nothing to fear because my self was mine to give. Because all the while, I could feel an ocean breathing beneath my skin; and have you ever known an ocean to be tamed?

I wish that it were not so easy to fall into such tired clichés. They do not lend form, or truth, or meaning to these hollow words. But still I must wonder if I am being drowned, or saved, or baptized. I must always long to have been taught whatever difference lies between love and degradation, must always wish that they need not be forever joined in my myopic eyes.

I want to know now what sweet and gentle things my soul is capable of, how many ways I can work myself inside of you, but with intentions, for once, wholly pure. I want to know how many ways I can bring ecstasy to another living being. This desire is more than physical. It is cerebral, rooted in the mind that has tormented and sustained me, in the desires and the decisions upon which I will likely die impaled. I have to know myself, whatever the cost. This is the choice that I made.

So if you ask me to stay, I will try to, for as long as I can feel this way, and as long as these melancholic pleasures still murmur across the shorelines of my skin. I will remain and remember the best of these uncertain days, awaiting the inevitable realization that your deficiencies are neither transcendent nor justified, that I can no longer misrecognize myself within the depths of your eyes. And when I find that I cannot go on, that this lie of ours has lost both its form and its meaning, then I will leave without pretending to understand why. I will return to my words and to my solitude, and my heart will forever know a quiet tenderness for those hands that brought me such joy as they ran, like light over water, along the length of my bared soul.

Soon I will remember that I am more than roses. That there is a world and a history written into the folds of my skin. That there is a language to my movements and desires, incoherent though they may have been rendered by the immutable absence of one capable of translation. This is the day you will lose me.

Broken, torn, tasted, I grow weary now of searching hands, of stripped and selfish love. I want to be unfolded, opened, turned back upon myself in reflexive ecstasy like the pages of the books I have loved so well since childhood. But I am afraid that I am no longer the same body that I once was; what knelt there among the restless waters, this fragile expanse of skin over bones, the abject eyes, the notches of my spine—that was not who I am, but what was done to me. My form has become prismatic, all vertebral ridges and geometric planes, wasting away towards nothingness (as are you, my dear), evoking its own masochistic history.

I want to know that there is someplace left to lose myself. I want to submit to these waters, toxic and timeless, and taste the salt and sacrifice of my willful subjugation. I want to feel your hands along the margins of my body, reminding me gently and irrevocably of how very alive I am.

I am tired. I am so, so tired. It is never anyone’s fault when I begin to feel this way. This is the longing that lies at the heart of my ecstasy as well as my grief, texturing my writing, my loving, and all of the directionless longing in this self-consuming mind. I need something that no one could ever give to me; there is not a body in the world that can shelter me now, not even my own.

Perhaps it would not be so terrible, then, to give myself up entirely; to limit this mercurial existence to whatever pleasures my body can provide. Is it really so different, after all, from the decision I made two years ago, in becoming an organ donor?

So someday, please, if the time has come and you still remember this, make sure they take whatever they can from me; whatever is useful, whatever brings peace. The lungs will be worthless, but there may be something left for this body to give. As for the rest, bury it at sea. Do not hesitate, do not delay. I will be ready then, I promise you, to look upon the Atlantic once more.