oh pearls. It’s just the vibe you’re going for, right? a relaxing day at the beach.
just the vibe you’re going for, right? just the perfect little touch to complete your aesthetic. wrong.
terrifyingly wrong.
do not wear pearls in the ocean. I learned it the hard way. I learned that the ocean is angry. The creatures of the ocean is angry. You can hear it’s hissing if you get close enough. If you have something it owns. If you have something it wants.
I don’t have any other way to tell this story, ever since I was little, I was fascinated by the waves. I nearly drowned twice, and if you’d ask me what drowning feels like, I would have to tell you that not everything feels like another thing,
though for now, i’m getting ahead of myself,
let me clear it up; I still live in my childhood home with my family. My parents are pretty ordinary people. My dad is a vet and my mom is an accountant and we had never been poor by any means but we had never been filthy rich either. This big house by the shore is pretty much the one valuable (really valuable) thing we own. My mom loves it here, she thought me how to love it here, and for some time, my aunt had been visiting us madly. For about a year now, i’m either greeted by her and my mom on the front gate when i’m back from school or I see no trace of her in the house, even if her car is parked in our backyard. I think that car has not been out of our property for a straight year. I always thought that she found it more convenient to come and go by the bus, since I remember her telling us that it is hard to find a parking space near her house.
I’m pleased that she’s here, because honestly, when i’m alone, the huge property seems haunted by silence most of the time. And the shore does too.
there’s hardly anyone swimming or even wandering around the beach besides me because the first entrance is too rocky and the way that the mountains are shaped brings in a constant howl of wind.
no one likes these. I tend to find them comforting. This may be selfish but the true reason I liked having my aunt around wasn’t really her chattiness- she was a fine, cute lady, don’t get me wrong, but she was just another find cute lady alright. I had always found her to be a little too superstitious. Still, I liked the fact that she liked the sea like me. She seemed even more compassionate in a weird way about going to the shore but I didn’t really question it. I remember thinking her getting ready to go seemed a lot like a ritual. Still, I didn’t really care.
this particular day I remember seeing her braid her hair effortlessly while casually laying on the sand and her white hair looked flawless. Few pieces that she forgot to tuck in were floating in the air and for a second I thought it was mesmerizing.
I somehow convinced her to swim with me. This was the first time that she was actually down to do so, and I had always imagined she was a bad swimmer and was ashamed of it, because my aunt was a pretty prideful women.
oh I was wrong. I was so wrong.
once my body fully hit the ice cold water, I opened my eyes and let the nature burn them with it’s salty water. I had never once actually tortured myself. I did it frequently. I hid it under the name of nature. This has nothing to do with the story, my mind is going feral now that writing all of this made me freak out even more.
well, my eyes got used to the torture, I saw two legs speeding away from me. In my mind I knew it was my aunt but that didn’t even made sense to me. Then I remembered she took of all her jewelry before diving in. Just as she insisted on wearing blue swimwear, or no swimwear at all, just like she showered herself clean before swimming… Who does that? Why would you do that?
I now have my theories.
I sped up trying to catch her. She might be a good swimmer but it was her first time swimming here, she didn’t know the line she shouldn’t cross. My mom used to call it the no-no line. It was all the eternity after that one green flag that she made my father stick into a rock when I was little. That was the most we were allowed to go.
She was getting closer and closer to the flag without even acknowledging it being there.
So I decided to dive even deeper,
take a huge breath,
close your eyes,
dive deep as you can.
I sensed my pearl bracelet sliding up as far as it can go on my arm, I swam to where I though my aunt would be, and I couldn’t open my eyes because of the pressure.
I opened my hand trying to grab her when I get close enough, and after seconds, I did, in fact, grabbed something.
Or it grabbed me. I’m not really sure. At first the hand hold mine gently, but then it dragged by body towards itself and when the grip got tighter, I could feel the claws, making my skin tingle.
I was running out of breath and the thing kept dragging me down and down to the bottomless blueness. The claws got tied to the bracelet I loved so much and I felt it tear apart. It was the one real piece of jewelry I owned, combined with it’s matching earrings, because I had lost the necklace of this combination a long time ago. And when the bracelet broke off, I heard a subtle hissing, both from whatever that’s holding me and from the sea itself,
I couldn’t help but think, during all of this, I couldn’t stop wondering;
how did my mother know?
how did she know where to draw the line?
Then I focused on the one thing that mattered right then and there, I mean, besides my horrible fear of death, but i’m guessing you can already imagine that,
What happened to my aunt? What is happening to me, again, duh, of course,
but did the same thing happened to her?
I started feeling the suffocation, that thing couldn’t go any more deeper or I had completely lost my sense of direction, when I felt another touch, one of it’s hands letting my wrist free while the other still holding, then with it’s sharp nails, it grabs one of my earlobes. The second hand fallows. Now i’m being help only by grips on my ears.
I felt like I was gonna explode, yet I could do nothing,
If you’d ask me what the fear of death feels like, I’d have to tell you that not everything feels like another thing. But I felt another thing in that deep fear too. Shock. Pain. The claws had grabbed my pearl earrings and took them, cutting my flesh so effortlessly.
And adrenaline can make you do a lot of things, guys, just seconds before I lost my conscious due to apparently drowning, I opened my eyes in shock. It was definitely something, and if you’d like to think that it is pretty I have to inform you that it is not. It was something, there was something, it existed, but I cannot explain its presence.
With my brain chemically shutting down and with the nature of that thing, only features I can really remember is its eyes that looked like little shiny buttons, and a grin that covered its face from ear to ear.
While blacking out, I saw it’s white shiny air floating in the sea.
It acknowledged my realization.
It grinned at me.