It is the middle of June.
The Black Sea is turquoise, stained by blooms of phytoplankton and polished with undulating mirrors, sunlight reflecting in ripples over the water. I stand on a tumble of rocks, holding an empty plastic water bottle and listening as the waves spit foam into the quiet of the morning. Seagulls wheel and yell against the sky. A magician I am falling in love with has asked me to bring him back a drop or two of the sea, this specific sea, the one I am close to. I meant to retrieve it—this seapiece—when I went swimming the other day, but I forgot. Instead I stood thigh deep in a cloud of green algae for an hour, my calves numb and my back burning. None of it made me feel as if I was anywhere.
Perhaps it was the traveling, airports, and rough blue seats blurring into safety announcements, or the cities—white chocolate drizzled on a waffle at a picnic in Johannesburg, an Orthodox monk walking through a thunderstorm in Sofia, a little girl with afro-puffs selling homemade lemonade in Brooklyn. Maybe it was the homelessness—a terminated lease in Trinidad, too many guest rooms in too many countries. They say the word nomad like it has a rough glamour, but in my mouth it is jet-lagged, wearing a sheet mask with fifteen minutes left, a draped attempt to fix its dehydration.
I don’t even mind anymore.
The state of my body matches that of my mind—floating, tripped, and suspended amid clouds, crashing down into borders, lonely. Nowhere seems real; all the people are constructs. I have stopped fighting detachment and started learning how to sink into it instead. Rumi suggests being dead to this world and alive only to God; in Sozopol, a former monk leans across a dinner table with bright stained-glass eyes and tells me about the types of nothingness in Buddhism. I tell him that my search for somewhere to be is really a search for self, and the only self I feel at home with is one that doesn’t exist, not anymore, one that’s been taken apart, whipped into dust.
I tie back my hair, so it doesn’t interfere with my eyes, and start climbing down toward the sea. My sneakers slide slowly over the wet rock and I drop my legs into crevices, press my palm against outcrops. The rest of the land grows higher and higher as I sink. The sea pulls. I could see how people would try to lose themselves in it, when the detachment gets too strong, when the urge to be nowhere becomes an action. I unscrew the cap from the bottle I’m carrying and crouch on a rock, dropping my hand and waiting for the surf to wash it full. I feel utterly alone. The water is clear inside the faint blue plastic. I should leave—I have buses and planes to catch—but this curve of nothing feels too right, so I sit there for a long time.
I text the magician, tell him about the way the sun turns the rocks into cradles and clothes-racks. Perhaps, with time, if I waited here long enough, I could dissolve into foam and be withdrawn into something vaster than my immediate body.
I want to be nothing, nowhere.
The magician texts me back. I too am turquoise, he says, stained by phytoplankton.