Until Tomorrow
The wine-red sea of Homer swirls and churns with raging waves and capsized boats. While the fate of these fierce sailors in this swirling storm is uncertain, unfamiliar or undocumented it certainly is not. I prefer the taste of wine red: dark, aged well and acidic, both in demeanor and in taste, and bound to leave a sour taste in my mouth. It leaves my brows furrowed, my lips pursed, and my finger, which I have dipped into the daunting glass to take one lick, stained a color nearly purple. It would look purple if my skin were as white as the plastered columns which tower over green lawns of a colonial institution.
Wine-red was a term used to describe the color and state of the ocean, perhaps due to the limited vocabulary with regard to color in times of mythos and hyperboles. I suppose many things can be described as such, like cherry coke, or the dribbles of blood when one pricks a finger, but I find that blood is more crimson. Thick, sticky, and overwhelmingly nauseating–so much so that it often feels inescapable. I have never found myself equating the month of September to blood, but it begins to feel like it when I am stuck in a pool of it that I can’t seem to get out of.
Or perhaps I am drowning, sinking further and deeper into Homer’s wine-red sea. The currents are kicking and stifling every piercing breath I attempt to take, the salt water burning my lungs and stinging my brown eyes, drying my coarse hair, while invisible hands reach up to choke me, telling me that I’m not wanted here. Others surround me, almost hidden by the blinding darkness of the monstrous depths, their mouths agape in silent terror.
A captain gazes down from a ship from above. I wave to him: he sees my desperate pleas to be thrown an anchor, we all shout and scream as we use all our might to kick our way up to the surface, waving our arms to show the passengers on that ship that We are here, but they ignore us, instead gazing at an idolized statue of a bulldog encrusted in gold. The captain stares down and throws a safety ring that floats along the surface, an unsatisfied and simple attempt to save those drowning below. It hardly aids in salvaging the air rising to the surface in bubbles as the bodies sink. We grit our teeth and ball our fists, tired, yet determined, to save ourselves.
We climb out, nails scraping in the rough sand, cold, freezing, wind whipping and cutting through our soaked clothes, only to be met with swirling tales and signs in the stars that are written in a different script. A fortune teller’s ball that is clouded, feeling like Alice, slipping and tumbling into a world with unnatural proportions, but how does one escape a rabbit hole that they’re left to fall into?
The rabbit hole may be deep, but it does not mean one cannot scale the walls. Pausing to look down at the chasm, above to look at the emerging dawn as the orange glow casts its hand to lift me up. Resilience is tiresome to implement to the point of insanity, but we remain for the next wave of Homer’s sea until tomorrow.
