Weightless

I stand facing the impossibly blue horizon of Ölüdeniz Beach.

On every side, the driftwood tourists, drawn largely to this particular southwestern corner of Turkey by its promise of cheap accommodation and decidedly un-Muslim views on carousing, lie prone on their towels. I am here to fly its mountain — looming Babadağ — but the clouds are stacked deep and the wind is gnashing its teeth, so my feet are, rather uncharacteristically, on the ground.

I peel down the layers to my bikini, leaving an untidy ball of clothing when I stride over and slip into a wave.

The Ölüdeniz water is salty and mineral; so much more piquant than the ocean water I grew up in. When I lick my lips, they taste like blood. In Turkish, the placename means “dead sea.” It was named for its preternatural calm, even in the grip of a storm.

The water here stings everything that needs healing. A cut on my hand; eyes, red and tired from recycled airplane air and incessant screenlight; my scuffed right heel — all singing with a peculiar, tingling pain.

So, too, my heart.

I take several languid strokes, pulling myself far enough from the thin crowd on the beach that my earplugs silence the roughhousing, bickering and shrieking that clings to the shoreline. It unnerves me to be out this far, but I’m eager to be alone today. Between the clarity of the water and the uniformity of the grey rocks below, it feels as though I’m floating over the surface of the moon.

I try to lose myself in the rhythm of hands and feet. When that fails I submerge, arms and legs akimbo, hair impossibly soft in its suspended animation. I listen to the morse-code clicking of the rocks far below me as they move with the shifting of the currents. I startle at the rocketship movements of the creatures that live here. They are entirely unperturbed by my awkwardness — a grave-faced porcelain doll, misplaced.

I have never minded solitude. Indeed, it’s my happy default. Solitude is the most defensible position; the most reliable refuge; the space where you kneel quietly and wait for inspiration to come shyly out from under the couch and nuzzle your hand.

These days, however, I’m thinking of solitude’s other faces.

I’m thinking about the solitude that lives in the moment just after my feet have left the cliff, when the buoyancy of the leap has just started to convert to downward speed. I’m thinking of a night spent crumpled on the floor of my own living room, next to a phone full of thousands of utterly uncallable numbers, emptying a bottle of whiskey into a solitude that had turned abruptly to despair. I’m thinking about the solitude that lives in the secrets you’re keeping even from yourself; of the solitude inherent in opening a door to your deepest inner rooms and waiting for someone to walk in.

And the solitude of that door standing open, unmolested by any visitor.

I surface. I look at my fingers, their pink topography shirred and contracted. I read somewhere that this is the human body’s elegant adaptation to increase grip in slippery environments. My hands, even, are trying to help me get a grip, as if it is clear on an elemental level how badly I need to do just that. I laugh a little to myself at that thought, floating alone in the middle of wet nowhere, and a drop of sanguine water traces my lip as it moves into a curve.

I slip under the surface, pointing home, letting the kneading hands of the current roll me along, paddling towards the grip I need to get, the shadows of that clicking lunar surface below me a reticulating mirror of my mind.