The Second Choosing of the Sea

The Caribbean Sea is where countless threw themselves, and were thrown. Some were being punished, and others, contending with their mortality and the understanding of an awaiting tortuous life, made the decision to descend into the depths, and transcend their Earthly lives. The Caribbean Sea is where the blood of my diaspora, and the bodies they lived in, collided in ways that were as violent and countless as the waves that took them under. 

The Caribbean Sea is also where I sit near, bum scalding to the sticky sand. What looks like a motorboat, tears sideways across the blue in front of me. Belatedly, I understand this to be a wave, not a boat, that has ripped its way across the horizon. 

This isn’t like the movies at all. The scene of the calm and peaceful blue water seems a fairytale, as I regard the directions from which the water heaves: In and out, side to side and diagonal; crossing itself at times. The waves swell high above my crown, at times encasing me in a shadow that eclipses the searing sun. I watch it build upon itself and lift. In my chest, awakens a similar fear to watching a serpent rear its body up from the ground. Defensive. Dangerous. I can’t help a quiet mew of concern as it races forward, threatening to take me with it, and I also cannot help taking a few steps forward, hoping that it will. 

“The waves have spirits in them”, I tell my love loudly enough for the ocean to hear me (I don’t want to be impolite). Though, it doesn’t matter if I yell, my voice could only be carried away with the winds of the sea. The water here demands a presence, and a respect. On my first day, I ventured out, ankle deep with a phone camera in front of my face. A lick of water reached up and took my glasses, blurring my vision in its vengeance. I begged for them to be returned to me, yet they were gone.

 Myopia the village optometrist tells me hours later, futilely. I know. Myopic feels like the only word with which to describe my arrogance. To feel so entitled to approach the sea with a lens in front of my eyes. To reduce it  to a scenic backdrop on a vacation of my own feebly human design. Now, I bring my nose straight to the sand, seeing all I can in clarity. Each grain of sand is a different color, indicating millions of years and billions of specks of rounded coral, crystal, rock… and bones. I came to understand that if you do not bring an offering for the ocean, it will take one. 

These spirits, for lack of a better term, feel like a country in each droplet. The intelligence, the individuality, the violence. At each beach I visit, I dig my hands deep in the sand, hoping the essence under my fingernails might bring me closer to deciphering these messages from the dead. I wondered why we don’t talk about the composition of the Caribbean Sea. Hydrogen and oxygen, of course but what about skin? The teeth and the marrow, the DNA, the grief, the pride, the triumph and the devastation and elation of generations stopped cold.

Could anyone else feel that? We are wading in a tomb, a sacredness fills our nostrils and trillions of voices transmute through the clear water. “Those that chose the sea” is what they are called. I know they chose this instead of the carnage that awaited them on land-locked shores and thriving plantations. I know they chose to go together into that great blue, and I know that some did not choose this at all. If the options are death or death, then the scope of your choices are narrower, aren’t they? But being here, feeling here… I listened and they told me something that I did not know. That there are those who chose the sea twice. 

In the nighttime, there are flashes of lightning both below and above the ocean floor. I see highlighted spots of white light that soften before they disappear. It’s when the sky and sea are colored in the same ink that I hear the sirens call, reaching me in frequencies that are as irrestible and clear as yearning. Something below my collarbones responds and erupts into its own song, and in this moment I, too, wish to be loosened and washed away. Registering a return of my gaze, it’s with monumental effort that I turn my back to the blackened sea, with a twisting feeling similar to the ache of loss.

I am in love, of course. 

This sea is my kin, my most recent ancestors, the last vestiges I have of my heritage. No, I may not visit a family tomb, but is this not a mausoleum? 

No, I may not look up family records, but do I not feel marriage in the water and the moon?

I listened and they told me. They chose the sea, twice.