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Sometimes, Ling Yi's mind feels as wide as an ocean whose waves traverse the whole world over. Her demons wear the faces of continents; her mistakes are monsters swimming in the depths, rising to crush whole ships in their maws. The currents move with her mother's downcast eyes. The roar of the tide is the same as Mei Mei's cries as she fell to the ground. Now that their world has come to make no sense at all, her mind can add to the torrent the image of her mother jumping away from her into the sea. And as she watches that loss happen again and again in her mind's eye, the coldest, loneliest feeling that she's ever had spreads from her fingers to her toes. On this cursed ship, it truly feels like she has become an ocean, restless and violent.
But here too is Olek with his head pressed close to hers, his touch comforting, his words unknown but gentle all the same. He rescues her from drowning in the basket; he offers food; he smiles quietly, easily; his hands, his face, even his ears are dirty; he keeps the future in his pocket, the image of a lady standing in a bay kept close; he's strong but never harms. Slowly, like an oar dragging through heavy saltwater, she can feel his hand parting the waves of her ocean. He becomes a feeling inside of her that feels strangely as intrinsic and real and familiar as breathing. Without her even noticing, he turns into something essential; he shouldn't be able to pull himself so deep inside her when his gaze isn't penetrating at all. Dark, soft eyes that meet her where she is shouldn't overwhelm her like this, surely.
After all, the other man who Mrs. Wilson had offered her to had eyes that were the color of a piercing, bright summer sky. They gave off heat as they watched her, scalding every part of skin exposed. She had moved before him, waves surrounding them in their metal escort (coffin), and she existed in and between them: push, pull, desire, disgust, pride, shame. She was being eaten, used, consumed by the fire trapped in those summer-blue eyes, and the pain felt like a further consequence of the tea that Ling Yi had long ago poured into a porcelain cup. Mei Mei's face swam before her eyes as she withered in the heat, and as she danced, a painted face placid as they dragged a dead ship behind them, she watched her friend succumb to the drink Ling Yi had given her.
When she finished and drew herself up under those penetrating eyes to bear more consequences, the Frenchman spoke (more words she didn't know, that crawled into her ear like cicadas gone to ground), then fell, convulsing on the floor. She went to her knees, unsure, unknown, and now unseen. His spasms were strange and they scared her, but it also seemed like he was harming himself with them, and the part of her that is all ocean, that's as destructive as a monsoon, that killed her friend and got her in this room, whispered, "Good."
But that push inside of her met a pull, a rising pity that kept her there on her knees, hopeful that he would snap out of it before too long. It was the part of her that would hide in the basket on thick, muggy nights and wait for her mother to be done with the men that came in and out. It was the part of her that was steeped in regret, that was already bending under the weight of this false identity. This part of her wept, and dreamed, and wanted the world to be different, but it knew that she was stuck above all else. Where else could she go? What else could she do? She would always be bound to her currents, bound to the choices she has made, bound to that cup and this room and the facade she stole, bound even to this man that hurt like a blinding sun. She imagined that her future was laying there with him, twitching on the floor, and she had to see it through. This was the world she had sculpted through erosion and poison. It was hers to bear.
That was there and then though; here, after watching people run through their fingers like they were mere water, casting themselves away, and realizing that this ship has become hell or something close to it, the landscape has changed. Now, after Ling Yi followed Olek up into a container full of coal and heavy, hot air, she realizes that while Olek is very different from the summer man she had danced for (more patient and quiet and yielding and kind), he has become a part of her too. To her, he is like a pier rising through a thick fog. He offers a place to rest a while, a respite in unknown, uncertain, unsure times. His eyes peer into hers, using a gaze that is not cutting or scalding like every other one on this ship. Instead, it speaks a soothing, silent language (even though she likes his words and how they fill the air with his deep voice and match the strength in his hands) that feels like a cold, clear night back home after a thousand humid ones. Her body hears it better than her mind can. It turns towards the sound, leaning into it like high tide chasing the moon.
She can't help it. The calm caught between them is just so easy, so heart-stopping, so reassuring, so imbued with the scent of him and the coal on his skin and the bright sparkle of his eyes in low light. So she tells him, in the dark, "You're so different from other men."
Ling Yi leans in like a wave jostling a dock, breaking the calm between them. It's light, a mere hint of something electric and all-consuming because she does not want to scare him off with a typhoon. If he could fully understand her, she might whisper a confession to him, so he would see how important he is. She would show him how she is giving a gift of earnestness that she thought she had lost while watching her mother lay down many times over, then losing her friend horribly, then laying down herself, prostrating under a foreign stare, and listening to Mrs. Wilson say, "My, you are a rare bird."
She would tell Olek if she could, "I know you don't think I'm a bird to be caged and watched and crushed. I know that you are a port, solid but open to the tides. I sense it in your eyes; I feel it in your breath; I taste it now on your lips. Do you see the ocean that's worked its way inside of me? Do you think you could love that, keep that, bear that?"
Instead, she lives and dies by his hesitance in the kiss, in the way his body doesn't take what hers offers. The lack of response feels as unforgiving and unyielding as the modern, massive steel plates they're standing on. She withdraws and smothers the tears itching at the back of her throat with a deep breath. The scent of coal becomes oppressive in the instant that she starts to step away from Olek because her world is now no longer bound to him; she remembers then how it always before (the old, haunted currents rise, and she is so cold, scraped empty as she watches the people she cares for fall away). The tide recedes in the gap between them, exposing a strip of bare beach. In her mind, she is on her knees once again, mourning the future trembling on the ground before her.
But then it changes again, like a tsunami wave crashing in, pushing much further inland than just the beach. Her very chest is awash in his scent and his touch, broken apart by his sudden, earth-shattering response. His calloused thumbs are on her face, his soft lips are pressed to hers, his heart is nestling right up next to hers, and everything about him in this moment puts her mind and body at rest. They become instinct, sense, a breath of humid air exhaled, a cool drink of refreshing sweetness. All of it nearly makes her believe, despite the hell they're in, that her mother was always right: if it's not okay, then it's not the end. Here, they're okay, even if it's just for now. They've created a haven by speaking without words, with just pure feeling.
"You will not die," his tongue conveys to hers. "You'll stay with me, and we'll make it to where this journey ends."
"I go with you," her ocean says to his land. "My future is in your pocket, your bay."
When it ends and their mouths recede, reality pulls itself back from where they had pushed it away. But even it can't stop her from reaching a hand up to his lips and tracing the curve of his boyish grin. It can't stop him from pulling her fingers close and kissing them. And he might frown when he sees the coal dust he's rubbed off onto her skin, but she relishes in it and aches to tug him close enough that there are no gaps between them that water could rush through. That way, neither her mind nor this ship nor the ocean that has swallowed so much of her could pry loose the parts of him that she has placed inside her, upon her skin, inside her heart.
Olek seems to agree, because he leans into her again, collapsing the space between them into nothing, and for a little while longer, they part the seas on their terms alone. The future now rests just before her in the safe harbor that he's built for her inside of him. The whole world becomes a breath, a feeling, them.
(of course, when she does lose it, him, the last real thing she had, it was the ocean, the storm, the water itself betraying her once again, as it always had, and all she could do was scream for him, and stare into an uncertain future shining its light high, high above her, opening a gate to the purgatory at the end of this hell which she now has to walk without him since she has lost his bay, his gaze, his harbor offered)
(she's emptier than she's ever been, soaked to the bone, to the very inside of her head, to the hole that his language left behind)
(and when the simulation ends, she prays that they'll meet again, even if this is always where the journey ends)