I lie on a shore at low tide. I'm waiting, I think, for the distant sound of water to creep nearer until I am surrounded completely. I will stare at this sky until the liquid snakes across my eyes and into my body and I cease to know what a sky is. Then I will have come clear. Then I will no longer remember why there was such a tightness in the core. I will forget what it was that drove me to that sandy stretch and why I laid my sorrow across it like a sheet across a sleeping woman. A Victorian tragedy in soft marbled moonlight breathing imperceptibaly until it stops. Until it grinds to a stone halt, suddenly and almost surprisingly like a body being jerked off the ground by a rope it didn't know was draped around it's neck. The roaring water in my ears pulses the sound of a thousand miles of sea from the deepest abyss across submerged dunes and up the gentle slope to my angled, lilting body. And that is when I hear the song, the music that comes when the crashing is so far behind. The muffled voices of mermaids.