If there’s a tide, it is eating me, pulling me apart like soft lace. Cotton candy in water. If there is a tide, I am twisting in it. I am slow, sinuous, arms and legs long, drowning calmly. The weight of ten thousand leagues pressing the panic from my lungs. There is a tide and it is pulling me into nightmares I recognize. In this airless space, my mind creates. I am bloody handed and confused again, fugue woke and broken. The tide is washing blood down my throat, body too resigned to choke. I can taste you here, the delicate press of fingertips to pulse, inside me now. A nightmare of drowning fire, it is so quiet. The tide is deafening, swollen silence insistent upon every inch of my existence. The tide has taken the will to scream, a god drained of fight. The tide is endless, relentless, and I am tired.