HER

The sea does not sleep.
It breathes.
It chews.
It vomits foam like rotten teeth.
And I, trapped in this white tower, hear the iron moan with every wave.

The other woman.
Is she a woman?
Is she my shadow?
Chews hard bread and laughs with laughs that split in two.
I ask her name, but she answers me with songs of drowned sailors.
She says the lighthouse talks to her.
That above, behind the lantern, there isn’t light but flesh.
Sometimes I believe her.

Because when I climb the stairs, I feel it watching me.
The lamp turns like a drunk eye, spilling its gaze over the rocks, over me.
It burns.
It doesn’t illuminate: it burns.
I’ve tried to touch it, but every time I reach out, the flesh parts on its own.
As if it were already marked.

The woman accuses me of stealing her dreams.
She says I crawl at night, that I whisper names that aren’t mine.
I deny it, but in the morning I find my boots full of seaweed, and salt in my mouth.
The sea strikes, strikes, strikes.
There are no days or nights, only strikes.

Sometimes we eat together.
The table is short, but the silences are long.
She drinks until she empties the bottle.
Then she dances with the shadow, with her wet boots, with the cries of gulls that never leave.
I laugh, even when I don’t want to.
The laughter comes out on its own, like vomit.

I have dreamed of tentacles coiling around the lantern, caressing it like a lover.
I have dreamed of fish that speak to me in my voice.
I have dreamed of my own corpse sitting at the table, chewing hard bread, watching me with a glass eye.

She hits me.
Or I hit her.
The body falls, but does not die.
It resurrects each morning with more wrinkles, more salt on its lips, more fury in its gaze.
Is it her?
Am I?
Maybe we are the same, multiplied by the sea’s reflection.

One night, we decided to climb together.
The stairs were infinite, but we climbed them gasping, our hearts turned into drums.
At the top, the light awaited us.
We opened it like one opens a wound.
What we saw was not light.
It was something else.
A wet eye, a mouth that prayed, a body of fire that burned us with its gaze and was consumed.

Now I write this at a table that no longer exists.
The sea sings outside.
The lighthouse turns, always turns, even though there is no lantern nor flesh nor tower.
It just turns.
Me?
I don’t know if I’m still here.
Maybe I’m inside the lighthouse.
Maybe I am the other woman.
The sea does not sleep.
The lighthouse does not be silent.
And I… I can no longer tell if I am alive or not.