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He emerges from the coast, soaking from hair to waist, the skin loose on his bones. Detached. Easy to cast aside or draw close.
A breath in wet lungs. The air is different - easier to breathe, perhaps, something like too much freedom in his lungs and too much room to move his limbs about. He breaks free, head breaking clear of the water’s hold, feeling as if he is reborn once again, exiting the creator's womb.
He still retains eyes from the sea - deep and fathomless depths that light from above cannot breach and probe at - ringed with the brown of dead corals. He may seem a human from the shape of his face and the ridge of his nose, but the air he exudes and the way he swims through air suggest that he is a creature elsewhere. The ocean breathes with every ripple he causes in air. He loves the land and is wont to visit, but he and his skin eventually will return to sea.
He is shy, exceedingly so - as such, when his siblings visit the land, he lingers behind in the familiar cocoon of the ocean, afraid of the tales of caution. A human will obtain a sea spirit and keep it deep within their mind, so coveted that they would not be able to return home - and he fears, deeply fears that point of inevitability, of inescapable captivity, forced to remain stranded on a foreign place that he has no means to break free from.
For he detests the fetters he must wear, but he despises the inevitability of his choices, the restriction and finite decisions on his movements and freedom more. The ocean is both a point of infinity and confinement and he treads the fine line separating these extremities in his swim within its bowels.
He never emerge on land when there is not a storm raging. When there are winds bellowing and the crack of thunder on water, the humans flee - and Seung Gil breaks the surface to gaze at the empty air above water.
He prefers this over the hubbub his siblings gush about after their gallivanting on land, stretching their robes and legs. He fears the choices that he would be limited to and the enclosing darkness of playing by another’s rules. The thunder and the sea may rage, but he knows his options when faced with the absolute ruthlessness of nature. With humans - he does not know.
A ship is stranded out in the midst of the sea. Waves roar and thunder crack in the low clouds, accumulating weight and descending onto the turbulent sea. That vessel will break and sink into another debris at the bottom of the ocean, its people’s screams swallowed by the roaring of the raging ocean.
He swims away, breaks off from the hypnotic spin of the storm, vortex whirling away pieces of wood and swallowing whole screams of unfortunate souls who are stuck in the middle of the storm.
He had long taught himself to be indifferent to the happenings and goings of humans - nothing well ever happen between a spirit and a human. A cliffside, long long ago looms in his mind. He stretches it in vague outlines, and the sea washes it away, for nothing is permanent in water.
He swims, further and further away, until he cannot hear any sound besides the roaring winds.
His name is Seung Gil and it denotes his role in timelines, in one reading of the letters entwining his person. To be a way, a path leading into inheritance, of a rise from the murky waters, into the uncertain world below. He is to be the pavement unrolling before a generation of sea-dwellers, into the uncertainty ahead.
The veils of unfurling kelp, covering his eyes and nose and mouth. They choke him whole, embroiling him within their embrace, to trap light from permeating between the folds of leaves.
A warning, from the past, the future, and the time, now -
Beware of the humans, for they steal and lie and their words bleed honey gold. It is oh so deadly for we foolish creatures who mistake honeyed lies as love and affection.
He does not anticipate the human when he steps onto land, with his cloak drawn around his shoulder.
The ocean swirls and pools around his ankles and toes, foreign limbs and body parts still very weak and underused, even with his effort in coordinating and command for obedience from the limbs.
His cloak droops from his shoulder and he lets it fall to the wet sand.
A blur from the shore. A flash of green, maroon and gold. Something knocks into him and swipes his cloak completely off him.
He falls back into the shallow ocean, while the person who knocked into him falls forward onto the sand.
Seung Gil opens his mouth to reprimand the other for their similar lack of coordination where the solid ground under his fingers remind him with a startled breath that he is not at home and he needs to return for he had made contact with a human -
The human, a soldier, for none other dressed in such distinctive regalia, peers into the water, his boots floating further and further away into the ocean.
For his part, he had been struck mute and immobile on the mark that is half sand and half seawater. His cloak sits under his palm on the wet sand, dripping heavier and heavier with the countdown of how long he can stay on land. The soldier's knee, in between land and see, a bend to the structure, an unfortunate fall from the banana grove, breeches soaked with the coming tide.
He had never seen a banana grove, nor is he aware of other's kneecap formation. He peers at the strange misshapen appendage, wondering, wondering, where the vision of green - startling green - emerged from.
“I apologise,” a soft voice addresses him, “for I have startled you.”
He had, ever since making eye contact, lost the ability to summon his traitorous voice.
“Here,” the foolish human lifts his knee and offers a small palm, sharp dark eyes impossibly wide, almost as wide as a pinniped of seals twisting under moonlight. Dark eyes, warm mouth. A sweet always in his hand.
Seung Gil cannot help but blurt out - “Why are you giving me your hand? Do you not know of the legends?”
The soldier regards him closely, long and dark eyelashes brushing his skin as he closes his eyes in a blink or five.
“Was I not supposed to give you a hand up?”
“You risk being pulled into the ocean, by the hand of a gwishin. You silly little human -”
“My dear,” the soldier informs him, “if I wish to perform such a reckless act, I would do us the courtesy of informing you before doing so. What did you think of us humans?” A tilt of a head, a smile hidden in the left corner of the right eye. “Are we all suicidal idiots to you?”
He does not deem that statement with an affirmation. Enough was said about the nature of humans. What more could he, a predator, add to the descriptions of the silly prey?
“Please take back your coat,” the soldier insists, gingerly picking up another corner of his cloak. “It's how you'll return, no? I will not take it from you. I will not seize advantage of one who is vulnerable. It comes as no benefit to me.”
“What if this was a battle, human? Won't you lose terribly if your enemy leaves, unharmed, with your orders abandoned -”
“We are not on a battlefield and you are not my enemy,” he is reminded, so very gently.
Seung Gil breathes out.
Hears the You are my heart. You are the only one I trust.
Slowly.
Takes in more air.
“You're right.”
“I always tend to do that, darling,” sharp teeth flash. “Have your cloak. I have no use for it.”
“How kind,” he accepts back his skin.
“Not all humans are absolute barbarians,” the soldier rolls his eyes.
No, Seung Gil regards him. Not all.
He offers a hand out instead. “Seung Gil.”
His soldier - eyes of an ocean of life and hair the bleached wood beams of sunken ships - ghostly, ancient, an enigma - doesn't shake his hand, but smiles.
(“Ew you touched worms with your hands. I'm not touching it.”
“Ew you touched a banana leaf too. All sticky and gross.”)
“Phichit. Admiral of the Royal Thai Naval Forces. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
He returns to the ocean, cloak tightly wound around his bones and flesh, and wonders, truly, how did a human learn of a mermaid’s tongue to speak it with such fluency and swiftness.
(He also wonders, how the tongue that they trade in was a combination of his water speech, a language of the land, and something only they know.)
A veil from the future, the past and the now wraps tighter around his neck. Tongue swallowed whole, heart beating still and the breath in his voice silenced, silent.
Beware of the humans, for they steal and lie and their words bleed honey gold. It is oh so deadly for we foolish creatures who mistake honeyed lies as love and affection.
Reach up, pull open, emerge. Breathe in the sky’s air like it is the water flowing through lungs -
(Remember how your home had always been in the water - not the air, never the land.)
Those of his skin and eyes whisper, incessant bubbles worming under skin and ear canals - do not do not do not listen, do not fall prey to the land treading things with the sweet sweet honeyed cadence.
They will feast on your hollowed out bones, whole and fully, until there is no trace of you left.
He breaks the surface of the surf, gasping in the abundance of bubbles coalescing in his lungs. He remembers, yet he does not, a distant call, always throbbing, violent, rending fingers and bones and the soul away from the broken skin falling down down under -
“Gil,” he hears, the word like a mantra, a curse, a line of salvation against this world of sacrilege.
“Gil,” he hears, a prayer, a million things wished and hoped, but never uttered into being, a butterfly leaving its cocoon with the remnants of its web tangled between its sticky silky wings.
He wants to ask, wants to know just who this is that call for him so ardently, and why he is fettered to the water and deep in the bubbles of blackness below. There is a purpose to him opening these eyes of his, mud-filled rainfall crashing onto a rock at the mouth of a cliff - there must be. Even the fish and the sheer plankton of the choking ocean underneath the sun’s scrutiny - they have a purpose. To live, to carry on the legacy of living. A simple plant, the leaf of something, the tiny speck of moving, living organism -
They all live, for a purpose.
So why is it that he doesn’t?
Poor poor thing, the whispers coo, lost without a sense. Why won’t you close your eyes, let yourself drift off?
He has nothing, beholden to no name, but this he knows -
“Gil,” is a name, a prayer, a summon, a wish for more time, more words, more more more -
And in that space of breath between the incantation of his name, he will search, search, until he can find out where it is that the voice is spawned from, and who it is that speaks his name in equal measure of pain and relief, of lost and found reverence for something once lost.
He asks the ocean, one too many times -
“Am I lost? Am I yours?”
You are mine as well as the air and the earth between your feet. And the fortune of lost, only so many can be shown such a privilege.
He doesn’t think being lost is a privilege. He doesn’t think the ocean is a binding force - her grip on him is loose, the fetters between his ankles loose kelp that shake apart when he kicks off into the surface.
The coat on him is always dripping, dripping wet. When he closes his eyes he can hear the same scream speaking his name in all degree of devastation and dismay. There is a stop, a pause, and the name begins emanating from the coast.
He finds him again, perching atop the protruding rock pools, soaking his feet in freezing water. The ocean hurls waves that cut skin open with cracked seashells and the tears of drowned sailors swallowed up in storms, bludgeoning feet blue black and purple under diaphanous foamy waves.
“Hello,” he hears, the same voice from deep within slumber. “Violent, isn’t she?”
He is looking out to see, eyes waiting for a ghost at sea that will never return. Soon he will become the legend that the others murmur about, when the storms are high and the sea howls, they will talk of the lover who waits and waits and waits, until the sea mist and salt coat and eat at the skin and replace flesh with granules of the ocean floor, to human skin to salt, and there are nothing but limestone where a person once stood.
Seung Gil is apprehensive, wary, ponderous, on whether the numerous tales of those perching pillars leaning out to the gaping jaw of watery vortexes - he wonders if the chants of Gil Gil Gil emanate from these rock-solid peaks of desolation and the one that searches for him is constantly, always always lost without news of how he is.
He gazes at the ocean, humming her tune. Turns his back to the person dipping blue feet into clear salty water, tears of a thousand lost families pouring into a cavity and creating the violent creature unfurling before them.
“Violent and without mercy. It is how she is.”
The others, the ones with blood-filled eyes and gaping mouths and strange lacerations around their wrists and necks and ankles, the ones that tug his feet as he kicks to the open sky, many voices blending into a single murmur among the moving dark kelp - they warned him. They have been warning him ever since the day he caught the strings of Gil Gil Gil and had dedicated every breathing moment that his lungs expand out to, to search. They warned him, the words more a vibration through his concave chest and under cold skin, shrivelling fingers, everything all blue blue blue - too blue.
This one and many other ones - they will harm you. It is the same story as yesterday’s evening and the century before us, winding into an infinite loop of endless suffering.
“A love of mine is in her embrace. I do not think she is without mercy.”
He remembers this tongue, this voice, through a muted curtain of water, flooding inside his ears, drowning out the sight of a reaching hand and eyes of moonless nights, but he cannot reach out and grasp a hold of the hand, for he is without will, seized by the snare of the kelp coalescing around his ankles and neck.
“Did you, mourn for him?”
“Everyday that I am awake.”
“You...haven't found him?”
The man with the eyes of a thousand and more moonless eyes looks beyond and right at him.
“Yes, and no. It is a long tale.”
“How long? I have a lot of time,” Seung Gil finds himself swimming, hands braced on the rocks protruding out to sea, a calcified display of countless tears that waited.
“Won't your friends be upset?” The man touches a fingertip into the freezing ocean.
Seung Gil had not felt any heat or cold ever since he heard the voice calling from far away, behind the curtains of sea water and kelp.
But his fingers, floating in the free water, wash up and overlap onto the man’s wood-carved fingers, brown and translucent white knocking into each other, moving in and out of separate existences and merging into one and the same.
He feels the spark of warmth, for the first time in many evers.
It brings back the memory of long ago, sunlight washing over his face, eyelashes and shoulder, and lips, the memory of someone holding his skin and hair so tenderly - the face obscured in shadows, but the voice -
("Heya, Gil, wanna stay for a little bit longer?” )
- it is still the same.
(In Phichit's mind, a memory plays. It is the one vivid and distinct nightmare that he finds himself trapped under and over and subsumed in - with no viable option for escape.
He watches, a spectator even in his own mind, and can only murmur a name lost to the ocean storms.
“You're the only one I trust -”
“No, no, birdie, please -”
“What's with that expression on your face? Even like this, I can see the face you make. Worried doesn't look good on you, Phichit. Happy. Happy and chipper. that's what you do, Phichit Chulanont.”
The sun dips beneath the mountains.
“Thank you. For everything.”
Phichit does not speak. Does not raise his head.
“If you're my friend, my everything more, don't stop me, Phichit. It's what I want. Please.”
(He does not speak, does not call out, even as the ocean mourns in his stead.)
Seung Gil stays. A loose spirit chaining its foolish self to an outcrop of a rockpool, trying to search for salvation between closed tight fingers and freezing skin.
A whisper. A breath. A rush of water into his ears.
Behind the curtains of kelp, the spirits would hiss. Hoarse throats scrabbling for purchase with his loose robes and pulling, further, under.
You are a foolish spirit. You beguiling idiot. There is nothing good that the humans had done for us.
He tires from this game of who wins between the tugging from tattered ends of this sinking ship rope, amounting to him afloat, listless, amidst open raging sea.
But he's my friend. He never once harmed me! He screams back, throat choking up in saltwater. The same voice in defiance to a raging village, torches raised
How do you know? How are you so certain he won’t harm you again?
He is amidst rubble and flotsam, and black eyes of the ocean spirits flood around him, a circle of menace, hissing, calling upon a memory his heart ought to have forgotten, to transition beyond.
Again?
The one that yearns for you, and the one that killed you, their fingers and robes are the masts of ships wrecked by tornadoes and hairpins of many harlots swallowed whole by the ocean.
Phichit is heard, again and again, over the surface of crystalline water, calling for his name. Again and again and again -
- is one and the same.
There is a cliffside in his mind and he will speak it into remembrance.
His heart forgot, but his arms and back and this wet dead skin remember. Everything remembered. To be a water spirit, a (( gwishin, )) in his own tongue, is to be dead.
He is a living spirit, a walking ghost, and he should not be here.
This time, instead of his own name being flung out forlornly across the ocean, it is his own voice that calls for another, emerging from the deep. He thrashes free, from the other ghosts dragging him under, and swims towards the shore.
His heart only remembers snippets of memories, all of them with Phichit and Phichit only. They are all selectively happy. Private. Kept enclosed between the two of them. Held within the fingers of his hands, rough and dirt-streaked, clasped tight behind closed lips and open hearts.
“Phichit!” He bellows into the ocean roaring sea. “Phichit!”
There is a shadow, close to calcification on the outcrops of waiting tears, and Phichit is there, feet in the water, shawl around his hair and shoulder, ears straining out to sea.
“Phichit!” He roars, voice the same sound as the ocean screaming behind his back. “Who am I? What am I, Phichit?”
(A foreigner. Fair, exotic, unattainable - a painting - not human. Something rent from the ocean’s bosom and posited onto land, on temporary loan. He will return eventually.
What do I taste like?
He remembers banana leaves and coconut juice running down their cheeks and throats.
Like everything good in the world. Everything I had ever wanted and needed, they’re all, a hand over the left side of his chest, here, with you. )
“My friend,” Phichit tells the howling wind.
“Don’t lie to me, Chulanont. You know me. I see you in my head. Who am I?”
(It is a punishable crime, by death, to be caught in the embrace of another man, he, who is a man himself. It is a crime to love, and he will be a martyr for this love, the love that cannot speak its name in open space to other men who scorn it and punish for it.)
“My heart,” Phichit sobs. “My evermore.”
“What happened to me? How did I die?”
The voices rise from the ocean. Grotesque, twisted shadows, engulfing everything whole.
He. He killed you. Pushed you off those cliffs yonder. Your own body break and splinter, and now you are just a listless, listless thing, a shadow of a slave sold to appease the lust of an expanding nation. There had never been value in you, dead or alive. Sinners don’t belong where virtue lie.
“I,” Phichit sobs into his palm. “I am sorry, Gil.”
He does not listen to the ocean. He is the ocean’s, body and skin and robes, but his heart, his heart remembers being here, with this person, this soul, and it is remembering entrusting everything he is and isn’t, to this one, on this outcrop of tears.
“Phichit,” the heart remembers, when the body does not. “I have told you. We must be sufferers to be lovers. How did I die, dear soul of mine?”
“You - they were, the navy and the villagers, were going to stone us. You - your lungs were awful and you told me you wouldn’t last long anyways. We took a walk, to the cliffside that we always do, it’s our place, and -”
He sees it, so vividly. The body remembers.
Falling. From so far away. The same phrase, over and over -
If you love me, don’t stop me now, Phichit. There are no other options for us. Live on, and remember me.
“Phichit, why am I still here? Phichit, I’m dead. This - this is a shade, a shadow of what I was. Why can’t I move on?”
“I -”
The tales of the cries and laments of those living who mourn for the dead, the ones who cannot loosen the hold of the memories of ones who had already exited the world of the living, the tales are gruesome. Cruel. The spirit is loose, sometimes remembering, but other times they do not, left to wander, haunting the place where they had last been, searching, searching.
“You need to let me go, Phichit. Please. You had fulfilled your duties towards me. I was ready to meet my end. You cannot - this is not - what I am now, this is not natural. Please, Phi, let me go.”
For a moment, skin becomes rock and Phichit is just another outcrop of rock overlooking the raging sea. But there is a faint pulse there still - and Phichit twitches back into skin and bones, gaunt, no heart left in him to sustain the rush of blood.
“There is nothing else for me, in this world,” Phichit begs. “Let me come with you, please.”
“Oh darling,” he cannot touch, for this is only an illusion, a trick of the light. They are worlds apart and they cannot be together until Phichit goes to join him.
He cannot have that happen.
“A whole life lies ahead of you. You have so much to live for. I am nothing, Phichit, and in death I will fade back to nothingness. You are so great, the general, the upstanding citizen. Don’t take the easy way out, Phi. Live, for me. Please.”
He knows it is cruel. But Phichit had been equally cruel in recalling him back to the accursed land where he does not belong, solely for the atonement of his guilt.
Seung Gil must move on. So must Phichit. This love had never, or meant to, last.
“Phichit. Please. You are my soul. The only one I trust.”
It is cruel, to die twice, before the eyes of someone who has nothing else but him. Arms out, fingers outstretched, and a piercing cry that silences the storm. Splits him apart but he is never together.
“Please, Phichit. Let me go.”
“I can’t - I can’t -”
“Phichit. Phichit. Phichit, we are only hurting each other -” He calls upon the ocean, asks her to take him again in her bowels. Takes him where he must be next.
One last time. Mud to night.
“There is one thing that is certain, my soul. I will never, betray you.”
The ocean opens her jaw.
“No. No. No. NO!”
Scholars and poets will write and sing and lament of this - them, inseparable, bond that is truly special, two whole that really illuminate special bonds between persons. Everything more and nothing less. T ruly a tragedy. Two lovers shunned by the world around them. Nobody to love but each other. Acceptance only at death.
Phichit, who walks the night, is heard of no more. Phichi, who was last seen walking to the cliffside, the point of beginning and continuous grief, back to his home, head tipped back and further and further, is heard of no more.
“Phichit.”
“Phichit.”
“Phichit.”
“Phichit.”
In the bowels of the night, a single voice. Just like that. His name, two syllables, over and over.
Seung Gil. It is no other voice but Gil, his Seung Gil. Calling for him, begging for him to come.
He goes. At the cliff side where it all starts and ends, Seung Gil is there, silhouette of a sliver of moonlight, like he had never gone away, and falls into his embrace, into a curtain of the night.
And Phichit is heard of no more.