Drowned Girl

JANUARY 27TH 2018 AT 12:38AM: The waves inhale and exhale particularly strongly, the moon above lighting the scene. A girl stands on the shore, just out of reach of the waves. The sands churn with each crashing breath and the dead are spit up onto the molecular planes. The miasma of rotting fish and seaweed comingles with the salt in the air, the steady white noise, the dimly visible silver sheen of the sharp striations in the water which smooth out the moment they appear. The waves creep up further, swallowing up more of the shore, the icy cold Pacific waters reaching her numb, bare feet. She steps out, the water rising up her legs, enveloping and penetrating between her thighs, shocking the nervous system. She stops for a moment, forces herself back into motion, unable to feel anything from the waist down. The water is up to her chest, gripping her neck, then pulling her in.

The caps rise and fall, battering her, crashing down by the weight of their dying intensities. She stays afloat uncertainly, suspended over a dark well of infinite possibilities. The winds sadistically blast her soaked face which has already turned a translucent white before she lets go and descends.

She opens her eyes to see an inverted horizon dimly lit by the moon. Her body has become entirely numb; she no longer has any sensation of a body at all. She may as well no longer have one, and as the water begins to rush in, oxygen being cut off from her brain, lungs bursting open and leaking saltwater into her chest cavity, she no longer has any thoughts. In the flatline moment of absolute terror and physical agony, time is suspended over the unknown depths of the present. She begins to sink.

She has never been anywhere other than here, drowned and descending through the darkness. Her body is no longer hers; it has become autonomized, belonging to the flows of dead fish. She diagrams a former existence that had never actually existed, a waking dream that slips into a dreamless sleep. A waking dream of being human, a dreamless sleep of being a woman, a molar identity with subjective instrumental control over a body which becomes attuned to the oceanic flows of death, catastrophe, infinite succession and regression, and immemorial deep time. In her former human existence, she has no utility, exists under the tyranny of subjecthood, relentlessly reterritorializing the immanent strata of the earth and making it an object that exists for the subject. The human being takes objects as being there for them, practically coming into existence the moment they are needed before receding into the tangled synapses of memory. They surface, resurface, themselves hidden beneath the surface of the earth.

Her former existence as a human being, as a subject which claims for itself a body, was never womanhood. On the surface, beyond the shores where intensity reaches its highest pitch before flatlining, she existed as a deceptive image of humanity harboring within it a demon. This image of humanity, this false memory of a former life on the surface, this is the waking dream that held within it the exit, the summoning sigil inscribed on the shores that is taken out to sea and thrown about in the undercurrents of the lesser depths. It slips from a memory of humanity deeper into the depths.

The body, the drowned girl, descends deeper. Her ankles are tickled by the passing fingers of forest kelp, fish swim past, inspecting and perhaps biting off a chunk of flesh if they're able to. The body has become waterlogged, the pigment which stored the memory of a dreamed sun fading out of her skin and mixing with the salt and miscellaneous filth. The current drags her deeper still.

She has never existed as anything other than a body suspended over an abyss, in a transitory state of drowning, as a body without the capacity to contain a subject. She is stillborn in the oceanic womb, never having the capacity for utility to either record memories and represent, never able to be represented and recorded, neither a site of production nor a site of exploitation. The infinite second between life and death, the incommunicable knowledge of a decapitation victim's 20 seconds as a head without a body. She has no past and no future, and in this second before absolute annihilation she will find infinite possibilities laid out before her which deny even the solace of total dissolution. "Annihilation is much harder than you think."

The drowned girl's body is no longer within reach of the moonlight. As it slips deeper down, it departs from the earth, is part of the perpetual night sky below. The body's flesh is pruned, eyes staring into the nothing as hagfish burrow into her chest cavity and hollow her out. They force their way through the spaces between bones, into the stomach, stretching out veins. Sharks swim by and bite off chunks of flesh.

Because they only view things as they exist for-them, human beings have never supposed that water could exist as other than in relation to their own health. Water carries with it both disease and cleansing, but only through drowning can one make the transition and see water for what it really is. Saltwater in particular, which is simultaneously purified through the salt yet also hazardous to human health, reveals the unconditional molecular nature of water. It erodes the shores and drowns organisms from the surface. Its depths deny the existence of any living things with the capacity for memory. Its time is colder and more inhuman.

Her bones settle in the middle of a vast black desert, awaiting the death of the surface, the death of memory.