The only time that I can sneak into the bathhouse is in the midnight, when everyone is in their beds asleep, when the hot water stops running from the mouths of the marble lions around the bath pool so the water is cool enough, and when I am all alone. As I lay myself into the water, my waist below joints, I can feel my legs mingle together, wrapped with another skin so tight, and covered with fish scales in the color of aqua that glimmer under the moonlight through the window. Then from the tips of my toes expand an enormous fish-like caudal tail. Here is the only place that I can reveal my true form. Though my movement seems bound, it is in fact the time when I actually feel free. It was not until by my age of four did my body started to have this kind of transformation when I was put into the water. I remembered Mother nearly fainted, and she assumed that she must be cursed to have given birth to such an inhuman creature. Since the day after, my parents looked at me in a disgusted way as if I were a demon which would bring adversity to this house. Father imprisoned me in a small cabin near a pond in the forest—they segregated me, still kept me secretly, for no one would wash their dirty linens in the public. They fed me everyday just to keep me alive, but that was all they did. They believed that if I died, the evil spirit of mine would remain and took revenge. I knew I was no longer loved, and I knew that they were waiting, waiting for the chance to drive me out. Father and Mother never worried about that I might escape away due to my inability of speaking. My words were aerial, merely fricatives or nasals to them, so they deemed me a dull nuisance. However, they never knew that everything got reversed in the water. Un... ... middle of paper ... ... the mare, and the salty breeze gently shave across my face. I listen to the sound it makes when the wave hit against the reeves, which I assure it belongs to my language. Step by step, I walk into the water, immersed my waist below in it. As I turn around and take a final glance at him, I sink into the brine. The current washes my clothes away, and I feel revived. The sun now has risen, so I swim near the reef that the prince stands on, wishing to leave a gift for him. I hand him the pearls I preserve. He is astounded, yet nods as if he knew what to do with them. I smile and disappear myself into the deep blue. Near the end of the day, when the sun turns into tangerine and dyes the sea with its reddish beam, I hear a loud splash behind me. Then a voice rises from the very bottom of the ocean, welcoming the figure that jumped in and says, “Welcome home, my prince.”
In the story of “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, the bathtub trick was unknown at the beginning, and this unknown created a sense of longing for an absolute meaning. Then, the mystery was revealed at the end, “Aimee and Geof are really just houseguests in the monkeys’ world: they are there for a while and then they leave” (Johnson 352). The revelation at the end satisfied me because the mystery is now known, and
The ocean is mysterious to mankind. The unfathomable vastness of the ocean intrigues humanity into exploring it. In life, the immense possibilities that lie in the future compel us to reach for the stars. In the poem “The Story” by Karen Connelly, an individual willingly swims into deep waters even though they are fearful of what may exist in the waters. The swimmer later finds out that their fears were foolish, which illustrates the human tendency to venture into the unknown. The theme conveyed in this poem is that life is like a rough, uncertain, uncontrollable ocean that we must find get through with experience.
"The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in the abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water." Chapter XXXIX
This is the first sign of exile the seafaring man shows. He begins to realize how alone he really is on the ocean and
Under the sea, in an idyllic and beautiful garden, stands a statue of a young man cut out of cold stone – for the Little Mermaid who knows nothing but the sea, the statue stands as an emblem of the mysterious over-world, a stimulus for imagination and sexual desire, an incentive for expansion of experience, and most predominately, an indication that something great and all-encompassing is missing from her existence. Traces of curiosity and a vague indication of the complexities of adult desires mark the child mermaid; in such a stage of development, the statue will suffice. However, as the Little Mermaid reaches puberty, the statue must allegorically come alive in order to parallel the manifestation of her new-found adult desires – the statue must become a prince in his world of adulthood above the sea. Thus, powered by an insistent and ambiguous longing for self-completion, the Little Mermaid embarks on a journey of self-discovery, and, to her ultimate misfortune, prematurely abandons her child-like self as sexual lust and the lust for an adult life takes hold of her.
“I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more. But when at last I wrote my first words in the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale”.
Through metaphors, the speaker proclaims of her longing to be one with the sea. As she notices The mermaids in the basement,(3) and frigates- in the upper floor,(5) it seems as though she is associating these particular daydreams with her house. She becomes entranced with these spectacles and starts to contemplate suicide.
...as I began to walk in the water every imperfection on my body burned as the salt cleansed my skin. Knee high in the Dead Sea and my body even then began to feel weightless- the water carried me. 3 feet deep and no matter how much I tried to touch the bottom, I couldn’t. No one was splashing because if the salt got in your eyes it would be an unbearable burning feeling. For the first time all senior year I felt like I wasn’t in control. I let the water carry me. There wasn’t fear, I didn’t worry about getting carried out to far, nothing lived in the water so no matter how far I went, nothing could pull me under. For the first time all year I wasn’t worried about graduation, finals, or even college. It took me dipping my toes into something big and scary to finally feel relaxed and at peace with myself.
“The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in
The smell of the restaurants faded and the new, refreshing aroma of the sea salt in the air took over. The sun’s warmth on my skin and the constant breeze was a familiar feeling that I loved every single time we came to the beach. I remember the first time we came to the beach. I was only nine years old. The white sand amazed me because it looked like a wavy blanket of snow, but was misleading because it was scorching hot. The water shone green like an emerald, it was content. By this I mean that the waves were weak enough to stand through as they rushed over me. There was no sense of fear of being drug out to sea like a shipwrecked sailor. Knowing all this now I knew exactly how to approach the beach. Wear my sandals as long as I could and lay spread out my towel without hesitation. Then I’d jump in the water to coat myself in a moist protective layer before returning to my now slightly less hot towel. In the water it was a completely different world. While trying to avoid the occasional passing jellyfish, it was an experience of
The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace (Chopin 25).
“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”
This poem is full of visual imagery; one can imagine being the speaker, staring at the fish on the hook. The fish’s brown skin, shapes on his scales, the tiny white sea-lice, the green weed, the blood flowing from his gills, his entrails, and his pink bladder all describing the fish’s body. This allows the reader to imagine as if the fish was in their hands. She not only illustrates the fish as a whole but also ge...
Closer and closer to the calm water, I began sinking deeper in the sand. It was comforting, the silence, tranquility, and warmth of the faint sun. There is a slight breeze, warm, but cold and lonely. I could smell the scent of fish blowing through my hair and body. The sun was still fading, slowly but surely the day was almost over. About half of it is gone now. I could see shades of blue, red, purple, and pinkish-yellow. They were mixed with puffy clouds that lined the beginning of the sky and the end of the water. I noticed the darker shades on the bottom of the lower clouds.
I let out a withered sigh, which caused me to choke in the middle of yet another sob. I had had enough. I weakly pulled myself out of the pool and walked to my towel. I grabbed the huge, orange and white stripped thing and wrapped it around my shivering body, hoping to find some warmth and comfort; but even my monstrous beach towel could not cut the chill I felt inside. I started to walk to the changing room past the hundred faces I knew nothing of, but by now were familiar. I had searched each face a hundred times hoping to see someone I knew. Finally, I realized that I knew none of them, and the person I was looking for just wasn't coming.