Eric Kocher is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston. Some of his work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, H_NGM_N, New York Quarterly, Octopus, and Third Coast.
I.
The long upward slope of the continent doesn’t seem at all unfamiliar,
even when the glistening skin of your back rises for the last time above
the surface of the water and the barnacles that have attached themselves
to your ventral side scrape hard along the bottom—for even they seem to know
when it is too late—you continue to move forward. And when you are lying there
on the beach, collapsing under the burden of your own incredible weight,
you feel betrayed by whatever it was that led you here, whatever current,
whatever instinct you trusted, however it was the coastline seemed
not at all like the end of an ocean, but as if it were the extension of one,
the possibility that things might go on forever, and only to arrive
there on the shore, unable to move, and find out that they do.
II.
Often, after the hours of digging and pushing, after being stranded for so long and so close
to the water, many will return, only hours later, to that same beach and insist on dying there,
and everyone who was digging goes home feeling helpless and stupid for having believed
with so much of their bodies in being able to give and give back. And it’s hard not to try
to understand, to imagine that one might actually be sad, or alone, or lost, that one could make
the choice to live no longer and then somehow, also, to arrive. To arrive home, as in, to get there,
to walk up to the door and stand in front of it waiting but who knows, really, for what, to turn
and walk away down whatever road is available, to keep walking and then to never go back. Or
was the door already opened? Did everything seem heavy and slow? Like there was only
to give in and nothing else. Like everything until this moment was suffering and the only
thing left to do was to go back in the morning and push the big dead thing back out to sea,
and then, after it had disappeared, to understand how things go missing, to try to follow it there.
