The Atlantic

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Grace Ann Elinski

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I’ve tried to drown myself in the Atlantic a plethora of times. I say drown lightly. Once or twice on purpose, the number blurred by the waves and liquor, other times just so drunk that maybe I might have drowned. Obviously, every time, I didn’t. Every time me and my cousin got drunk as adolescents we’d make the short walk to the beach, the moon like a magnet to our chests. It’s pitch black at night out there, I mean pitch. The moon glow lights up a strip of the big body but that is it. The Atlantic is no Gulf of Mexico; there is no trash and the water is not still. At night it grows wet and heavy; an inky blackness. Maybe we’re just pulled close at night like the moon is. For years, I have tried to come to understand it: the pull of the Atlantic. Every year I dip myself in, I’m sick by the end of the trip. I can’t wait to be home, safe, and comfortable. Really, really, next year, I am not coming back. There’s no need to try to drown myself in the ocean this year; I’m much too old for that. But so it goes, every summer I find myself coastal, and closer, and it is like a dam breaking when I give in. Twenty two hours in the back of my father’s SUV (I hate riding with him) or a quick hop on a plane (I’m an aviophobe) and I’m there. Every summer I laugh and cry and drink strawberry milkshakes under the neon sign and ride my bike back half drunk. God, near the Atlantic I get so drunk; my tolerance is cut in half. There is something in the salty air; there’s something in the fucking ice cream. Some nights, even still, we end up in the Atlantic under the moon. In a perfect world, me and my cousin, we’d float on our backs and maybe share embarrassing stories or talk about boyfriends. In the real world, we tip toe as far as we can see until a wave crashes at ankle deep water and takes us out. We cry, and we almost drown. We talk about how we can barely stand it. We talk about how all of it may never be enough. And what we may do when that realization becomes a reality. But it’s never been enough, me and her have covered that. I think by fourteen we covered that. We shared scar placements and calling boys until they begged us to stop and poetry books marked with blood. In our perfectly comfortable lives and our normal fathers, softball tournaments and high school friend groups, college grades and spaghetti dinners, we shared a black hole about as big as the Atlantic and even that couldn’t fill it.

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Grace Ann Elinski is a graduate student, writer, and photographer from Jackson, Mississippi. Her work has been featured in The Southern Quill, PRODUCT Magazine, Across the Margin, and Reckon Review. She has work forthcoming in Cicadian Rhythm, a new Mississippi Poetry Zine.

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