You can sink
You can sink on land. Your own weight pulls at you with layers and layers of damp clothes soaking around your steam body spreading in a pool across the stone. What does not sink into the joints and cracks and down through the piles and silt to wash back out to sea pools in shallow depressions worn by her footsteps, standing with her key at the gate and twisting her feet as she looks across the courtyard to her window, and evaporates at dawn from empty clothes mismatched in a pile with no correspondence to your human body. The bottom of the ocean in darkness ends with rock and sand. All of your sinking is on land. You ease into steaming water and your skirts billow with captured air. You grimace and your eyes crease. The walls are cool and yellow light from the window clashes with the liquid fluorescence of the apartment air. You balance the empty mug on your abdomen. As you sink to the bottom in the rising water the mug remains filled with air after your face submerges. Water runs into the overflow drain and toys with the rim of the mug. Your hair sways. Your back and calves are flat against the porcelain. There is no deeper to go until the apartment too sinks, when the tides rise to pull it, immobile, beneath the nightly flood, to was you both into the open sea, you diving, to land far apart after moonfall and never see one another again.
