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The first time Sleep found the sea, it was half-eaten and bleeding at its feet.
The world was cold and Vessel was nowhere to be found.
At a checkout counter, that is where Sleep finds Vessel.
This is highly unusual because Vessel isn’t often, if not ever, spotted outside, and especially not this far away from the others.
“What are you doing here?” It asks.
Silence.
He stills like fingers stuttering on an archery bow, gauging position and the direction of the wind — he seemed to be straining himself to ignore its voice, tentative about whether or not he was allowed to do so.
There was the faintest of recognition flickering in his eyes but the light of it was swiftly smothered. Sleep could take a guess at his thoughts if it wanted to, didn’t need to pry him open to know he was playing the same song on a loop, didn’t even need to ask to get it — understand it.
Because it didn’t matter if this was a quiet, one-sided exchange with no response on Vessel’s end, they were familiar.
If nothing else, Sleep wanted to think it knew him enough.
People were just so strange , God had decided, and the act of understanding should be reserved for those you care about because the human heart can only fit so much.
But Sleep wasn’t human nor did it have a human heart — it still worried regardless.
His clothes have the sea breeze clinging to his shoulders, and he nods to the employee helping him. Vessel makes the bag in his hand seem small and he makes himself look smaller in response; this is the ever-familiar song and dance of standing tall but not too tall or else you’ll stick out, and speak clearly but don’t enunciate every consonant and vowel or people will assume you think they’re stupid.
Societal norms sink nails through his palm, making it known that soft flesh is all he will ever be when faced with pressure and pain.
Sleep doesn’t imagine him outside when it thinks of Vessel, and that’s because Vessel has never looked at the sunlight as something to be eased by; sunlight is not a kind bird, singing a tune for him when he wakes up. Sunlight, for Vessel, has always been hours in bed and the clumsy process of remembering that a day starts at some point — that he cannot allow the time to fly and that he is unable to reshape it into something gentler to him. Sleep knows that if it were left up to Vessel, a full 24 hours would start and end when his rituals do.
But if it were left up to Vessel, he wouldn’t be here to begin with, but Sleep would be.
And it’s because things are out of their control that they are both here at the same time, and Sleep prefers it that way.
At what feels like the end of the world, Sleep is an aftertaste on someone’s tongue. Nobody dreams when their bodies are locked in combat, they flinch themselves awake and the dreams that repeat are shallow waters across sands of shattered glass. And so, Sleep remains placated by certainties that cannot be denied, truths that can’t be overwritten. It waits for when the bodies of man are obliterated and slumber seeps in like summer heat in your childhood home.
At the end of the world, long after life and death, there is Sleep.
Vessel is currently in the process of buying a single bag of saltwater taffy, he has never been spotted with it nor has he ever given the impression of having a sweet tooth. Except, that didn’t mean anything when he was desperately far from home at some seaside business avenue, uncomfortable and restless, all for the sake of taffy.
But nobody aside from Sleep knows that, and nobody except Sleep and the other vessels would care.
He’s wearing his mask, the employee doesn’t care; his hands are sweaty, the employee doesn’t care; Vessel walks out stilted like he expects everyone’s eyes to be on him as he goes, he expects wrongly. Nobody cares , that will be a mantra chewed between teeth but it will go unswallowed and unacknowledged. Like compulsively peeling off his fingernails until he’s bleeding from the soft bed beneath. Keratin castles gather around him to keep him safe, and he treats them like puzzle pieces to pluck off and refashion into something better.
Sleep pretends it doesn’t see the piles of neatly organized nails in Vessel’s personal altar — regardless of how it reacts, this isn’t an offering that could be stopped.
Minor injuries are healed anyway.
Somehow that makes it worse.
Vessel shakes while shoving the sweets into his hoodie pocket, and struggles with walking in a way his mind deems acceptable.
Every step taken is sugar poured into setting concrete, he is a mannequin in his own skin. Did his name refer to anybody notable, or was he the skeleton, the nerves, the joints, the thing that hid beneath the surface but the thing that people found to be repulsive when exposed? Nobody cautioned him about how there was a proper way to be a person, but he learned from observation that he wasn’t doing it right.
“Vessel.” It tries again now that he’s away from people.
And most days he wakes up knowing he will never do it right.
The first words he says to Sleep are: “It’s alright.”
He is muddled and malleable, not in the sense that he’s easily manipulated but because so much of him is composed of other people.
Vessel doesn’t exist, he is a container for someone else’s life, and whatever they choose to pass onto him, stitched together by scar tissue. Very little of his original body remains, he makes sure of it in areas that people are too scared to touch but aren’t scared to hate. Sentiments from bystanders aren’t enough, if they can’t put scalpel to flesh and barbed wires around teeth then he acts where only feelings linger.
It is no surprise that when it comes to grief, he is a testament to its power — a well-documented case study that can always be cited.
Grief leaves footprints on the shores, and when he walks beside them, he can’t compare. The tide drags itself up to his ankles, and all that’s left when it recedes are someone else’s marks — burials are 6 ft deep but his heartache runs deeper, deeper than his person, deeper than his life. There is an inexplicable pain associated with feeling as though you don’t belong anywhere, not even in your own body and let alone your mind.
When the surf slams against him, he is the seafoam carcass of mermaids in folklore. Still, he scoffs to himself and hopes his corpse would be a fraction as pretty as the ocean or the tales it brings with it. He thinks it would be nice if, just by existing, he could inspire stories that last for so long — to find worth in himself that didn’t require years to carve out. Because the ocean does not double-guess itself, and the ocean is equally loved as it is feared as it is necessary to make things whole.
Without the ocean, the ravine leftover would only be a fraction as unfathomable as him, but when people wash over it, it would be with sadness over what’s lost.
He fears that when he goes, it will be without a single good memory to hold onto, and nobody to know that he was ever happy.
Someone who is in pain may find it infinitely easier to focus on the open wound than to stay positive. Calming down and being rational is hard, especially when he spends most of his life riled up to begin with. Vessel bites his bottom lip, digs his fingers against the hard plastic of the candy bag, and knows he is born flayed, skewered in someone’s arms as they worked to resuscitate him. He didn’t scream until they wrenched him out of death’s hands, thus, his birth was only occupied by the voices of others.
“Why the taffy?” Sleep cannot call for the others without Vessel knowing right away, their distress would resound through hallways…, at least it thinks so — it’s unsure.
“It sounds good, doesn’t it? Saltwater taffy,” Vessel answers, “It has nice colors, too.”
They’re walking to where the waves are barely out of reach. The area is a graveyard with no life, not even a seagull can be heard. Vessel makes these grounds heavy with worship by trekking through, his presence stains the grains like trenches from war and red poppies in fields.
“You give and you give but what you give is the wrong thing.”
“Keratin, calcium, iron, and soft tissue — I am giving you everything that I am, everything that I could be, just like you asked.”
“You give me parts of yourself that are material in nature, and deny me the parts of you that transcend the blueprint of being easily mass-produced.”
The parts of him that couldn’t be treated like interchangeable parts.
“I am your vessel, and nothing more.”
The implication is that he’s always been an inanimate thing for his God, the reality is that he isn’t.
“You have always been you,” It insists, pleads, “I couldn’t take away your past life because you’ve convinced yourself you have never lived.”
“Because I haven’t .”
“Then why do you know you shouldn’t be hurting — if this is all you know as a thing with no history and no future, why do you know what comfort is?”
“I know because I see it in others, I have wanted it for others, and I -“
“You want it for yourself.”
“ No - I, no, no. No, I just…”
“You should want it for yourself.”
But they both know why he doesn’t.
The sea is quiet, inching closer to listen but never high enough to lean against.
“Take a nap.”
“On the sand? In public?”
“I’ll watch over you.”
If not because it is the voice of his God, it is because he trusts it.
Vessel lies down in the sand and Sleep is a seashell unearthed by the tides, but unlike commodities, it is spotless. Holographic oil spills bleed from the surface of its body, ridges evenly measured like Spring under the watch of the golden ratio. Sleep is a perfect thing, and for that, it is an unreachable thing. Vessel lies down in the sand, Sleep settles into the Earth next to him like a cadaver too good to be masked by the soil — a deity too beloved to be kept out of sight.
It clings to him, he clings to it.
There is no doubt in either of their minds that, without the other acolytes, Sleep could be sustained on Vessel alone. Such is why their arrangement naturally brought others in, because there are things Vessel cannot give to Sleep without being someone he is not.
There is a life unlived to Vessel that Sleep is worried he may never come around to.
“I always thought cake was fascinating as a concept because it’s like anything else, but it represents celebration and that makes it unlike everything else,” He rambles on, “A slice of congratulations. An edible party. Cake.”
“And saltwater taffy?”
“It’s pretty.”
“Is that all?”
“It gets stuck in your teeth, is irritatingly sweet, and you can only eat so much before feeling viscerally ill.”
“But you got it anyway.”
“I think it could be a slice of congratulations, too.”
When he stumbles into a brief nap, Sleep is somber like forests being carved away by rivers. It serenades itself in fabrics of humanity, swathes of its recollections kneaded apart and together — round and round its memories sway, eagerly looking for some balm of sorts.
Next to it, Vessel suffers the only way he knows how: with no indication that he is until it’s too late.
In his dreams, he lives in a seaside village where a single house isolates itself on a narrow mountain.
He stares up at it on his way to school, falling in line with the other students. They are young, with quaint uniforms and the scribbled-on faces of adults who seem so bright to them now. School is attended in a haze, blurred and honey-dipped like fresh biscuits out of the oven. The days are devoured wordlessly, what matters is that they are devoured at all.
Why are the days eaten so swiftly, so smoothly? There is no indulging, no savoring. Vessel feels like he’s being shown a scrapbook comprised of warm-tinged polaroids, images of his childhood in someone else’s hands with a speed that isn’t left up to him.
One day, Vessel finds that he isn’t happy anymore.
He isn’t even a child, though he feels too fresh to be aged blood and splinters that never hurt enough to be removed. That is because he is and has always been knees that click and hands that ache, and rusted fences in the back of a dingy building, and hurt; hurting. Always. He is used up cigarettes and bruises that do not blossom — do not form — do not merely appear because the bruises are the intake and the exhales of breath. Small-hearted, black ice skin, he bursts and breaks and convulses like carbonation below scar tissue.
Hold him wrong and he’ll cease.
There he is, always threatening traffic, daring cars to skid across his body to see how winter-proof their tires are. Will he die or will he damn someone else first?
Being a teenager does that to people.
Vessel hyperventilates in his dream, freezes in his dreams, and feels wrong in his dream.
School does not keep him from staring at that house, alone at the top of the mountain — the workflow and the studies are not enough to stay his eyes elsewhere. He yearns for it and it calls out to him, beckons for him to root his feet into its floorboards until home is the taste of sea-sickness, cabin fever, the rotting of the self until he is honey-comb hollow. Bees do not find him amusing, the wasps stay clear of his path.
He is the shore that whales kill themselves on, their bones and their carcass, the explosion of viscera, and the screaming of people cooked by and dyed red.
There is an entire life in his dreams, but because it is a dream, he remembers sparse specifics. But Vessel knows, every day that goes on by where he falls in line and disappears to the back of the building, he is losing something. Sleeping takes something from him, and he doesn’t know how to deal with the loss because he never assumed he had anything at all. It makes him want to peel the outer layers of his eyes off when he recognizes it — when he is forced to hear it.
The ocean sings to him about the Atlantic, and the seaside village has always been scribbles of people who were never real.
A dream that knows it isn’t a dream.
A person who is being taken from that doesn’t think he has substance to his existence.
You sink yourself into the void expecting complete nothingness, the sort of nothingness that comes with lying in bed, awake and staring at the ceiling somewhere between 2 and 4 AM when nothing is going on and nobody can bother you. The edges of one’s body dissolve into the softness of a silent and holy night, but that isn’t this. He isn’t this.
Vessel walks into that house at the top of the mountain, someone tells him he isn’t like what he used to be — he wants to cry even if he doesn’t understand what they mean.
He wakes up to a change in scenery, Sleep is no longer a seashell unbothered — it is a God wearing his face, there’s something off about the way it looks at him as he shutters the last shackles of slumber off his shoulders.
“You said you’d watch over me.” The sun has yet to inch into the horizon, but knowing it hasn’t been that long since he laid down is jarring.
“Did I not?”
There is something off about the way Sleep looks at him that’s jarring in the same way about that person in his dream who spoke to him.
“Do you know why we’re here at the beach?”
“Why?”
Vessel takes Sleep by the wrist and brings him further into the belly of the beach.
They are both unused to the process, but Sleep takes initiative and splashes water against Vessel’s face. In an instant, his mask is soaked and his clothing is ruined. Like a soggy cat, Vessel bristles and scoffs, and slams his hands against the surface of the waves as if he could grasp sections of the ocean and throw it at Sleep. He sort of could — the motion looked terrible, but somehow, he managed.
Sleep wears Vessel’s visage, the casual clothing exchanged for the robe and jeans, the paint does not wash off and his mask is perfectly dry.
In fact, Sleep looks like it’s the beam of sunlight breaking through clouds, a step of Heaven onto Earth. Water hits Sleep continuously while it shudders in laughter, it looks ethereal in every way a normal person could never be though they dream to be.
Like a seashell — an untouchable seashell that is God on the sandy shore, sitting next to nothing at all.
This is Spring, the flowers flourish and the mornings are honey-biscuit, swiftly devoured. Vessel doesn’t remember it in his dreams, he doesn’t think a seaside village has much of the spring season when all the seasons are the blue of tides. But, this is Spring , he is sure of it. More obnoxious than the salt water taffy, a stronger anchor than lighthouses. Sleep is a house of cards that fold naturally, easily — Vessel feels a different sort of moisture on his face, one unlike the sea but one easily hidden by it.
Spring is a happiness that hurts as does a love that you cannot have.
“I’m glad,” Sleep states, “The hallways are soft, like the candy you bought — the walls are caving in.”
“Like flesh decay.”
“Like cotton candy dissolving in water.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Sometimes…,” It hesitates with the sentence like it isn’t sure if it should say.
Vessel looks at his God and thinks, he knows why staring at himself — at Sleep’s rendition of him — is so jarring, and why being told, in his dreams, that he isn’t the same person he used to be is just as such. It’s jarring the way Spring and love hurts, the way it hurts to stand and be perfectly camouflaged by the sea around him.
Do you remember dissolving into the nighttime — is it much different from crying in the shower or mourning at the beach? The water is up to his shoulders and Sleep continues speaking without noticing.
“Sometimes, you feel out of reach from me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, you’re a good worshipper,” With a reassuring tone, it looks kind…, mask and cloak and paint and all — but it looks like Vessel, and isn’t it strange? “Do you mind if I ask something else?”
“Sure.”
— that he could look so kind.
“Why are we really at the beach?”
That he is capable of being kind in any capacity.
This fact stares him the way lambs of slaughter stare at the sparkling stars on the night before they’re killed — takes his form with the status of his God and he is so close to putting a word to the mouth of his sentiments. All of his feelings like porcelain masks hung up on the walls of his heart, glaring through him for not knowing better. He knows this season. The season knows him, it plays with him at the beach and he plays with it in return.
There are certainties that only worshippers would know of, the type that their Gods could not grasp.
What does God know of Laura Gilpin’s “Two-Headed Calf”? Vessel wonders if the calf would’ve survived had one of its heads been chopped off, but that’s only because he views the addition of the second as a parasite, something that would be of overwhelming relief to have removed. If it were left up to Vessel, the process would end in happiness. If it were up to Vessel, he would not be here.
He thinks, at the end of the world, that’s when he’s most alive.
How could rest be considered an option? No, no, no because at the end of the world, when all things finally conclude and he can feel a sense of calm in knowing heat death or some sort of mutually assured destruction would take place — when he is obliterated, he will be wide awake. Years after he is gone, after everything is gone, he will still be awake. Consciousness is the plague of mankind, it is what led to cemeteries being categorized as gloomy and it’s what makes the willow trees cower, hair covering their faces in rich saturation.
Vessel knows that even after death, he will not be allowed peace.
Sleep can be sustained on Vessel alone, that is a certainty that outlasts even the deletion of the universe, and that is why he will never be allowed peace.
“I love you,” He says to Sleep, “-- that’s an important phrase. I think there is a lot of reservation in using it but it should be used more often. Imagine staring down the maw of a gun and declaring your love. I love you, I love you, says the dead to the living.”
“Why do you think the dead love the living?”
“Why does the living love the living? Why are there stories about the dead reuniting with the dead and it ending in love? The dead can love the living, the living can love the dead.”
“But the dead can never return to the living, why didn’t Eurydice conquer the Underworld?”
“Perhaps she was tired, I don’t know; I do know, however, that love letters can be sent late.” Vessel feels the warmth of the sun on his skin as the horizon blushes peach, the water no longer as blue as it was from a distance. He swims further out, and his God dutifully follows close behind, “People grieve because of that — when you are graced by a presence so close to your heart, it scratches more than just arteries and veins; it gets in your eye, burns itself into your nostrils until it infects your brain. You won’t forget the way it sounds and the way it feels.”
“Love or grief?”
He wants to respond.
He does not, and instead of them both knowing the reason why — it’s only Vessel who knows because his God is no longer in his mind palace, because he is far from home from the other Vessels and more than that, he is far from pious. How could he be devoted to Sleep when, at this moment, Sleep looks like him? When Sleep shows him the life he is turning away from, where sunlight is a morning bird that lands on his windowsill and sings him songs as close as possible. A bird that wants more than to be a splash of color on oak branches and springtime leaves.
A bird that wishes to be part of his daily routine.
Vessel has never imagined himself to be the kind of person that appreciates waking up early and having people occupy his space, take up his time, recognize his face and voice — people who ask him to get out of bed while breakfast is still hot. Vessel has never imagined himself staying, let alone living.
When Vessel disappears beneath the surface of the water, Sleep cannot reach.
“It has nice colors, too,” Earlier, Vessel had said that about saltwater taffy.
“You give and you give but what you give is the wrong thing.” Sleep had once said.
Why couldn’t Vessel admit that he wanted the comfort he hoped for others? He sheds tears in front of his God about the comfort being shown to him, the softness in his body that he tried so desperately to keep out of sight. The liquid-smooth surface of his sorrow disappears with the seafoam, carried away like hands guiding his coffin to where he would be laid to rest.
But once more with bravado, he plays a familiar song — Vessel knows he would not be allowed peace, so he sings as Orpheus would to Eurydice, for Eurydice, always.
God is there until the warmth of color dissipates from the world, searching frightfully and forever.
Above it, the moon is a pale corpse in the sky and the sea, a slice of congratulations without the victor.
A bag of candy sits on pristine sand for nobody at all.
At the encore, someone asks him how he could have known his fate post-mortem, what he means by Sleep being sustained on him alone.
Vessel does not wait like an archery bow to answer —
It’s because his God loves him dearly, and for that, he will be suspended in a gallery of memories until
even Sleep
is lost
to itself.