You chug spiked hot chocolate, dig your toes into cold clinging sand, bare your throat to the maddened sprawl of stars. The light of the party is behind you now, and step by step you creep closer to the ocean. Your boyfriend is urging you on, his laugh ringing crystal against the broad bowl of the night, and suddenly you remember what your grandmother told you: Don’t swim too far. Her eyes glowing with an unfamiliar fear. You’ll lose yourself out there.
But right now all you want to do is lose yourself. Half your boyfriend’s face is burnished by firelight, half turned anonymous by darkness. You take his hand and pull the two of you into the water. The cold is a pane of glass shattering over you, through you. You spit out salt and seaweed and swim out and out, imagining that you are turning into a seal, your muscles sleek as ice. Until the sound of the party grows cottony and faint and vanishes.
You stop swimming when you feel yourself starting to change. Your boyfriend doesn’t notice—as he catches up to you he starts laughing again—but something about your mouth is different and you can’t laugh anymore. Your throat tightens; suffocation beats heavy wings in your chest. Above you the sky is remote, crusted cold with stars.
The filmy taste of chocolate curdles in your gums and now the salt below you is what you crave, the chill brine of it on your tongue. Your head goes under and you suck the water into you, pulling it through your teeth and ribs and skin, making it a part of you. Your heartbeat turns slow, velvety; your consciousness washes away in bits.
There are only a few things you can focus on now, and you name them as though it will help you stay. His hands, hot like the burn of freezing water just before it numbs the skin. Your bones, bending stemlike, resisting fractures. Your body, coming apart in the waves.