If I’d known that marrying you would be this cruel, I never would have done it. You’re tied to the land, now: tethered to me like the sea-women in the stories, their seal skins held captive by their fisherman husbands. You can’t survive here any more than I could step out of the rough-plowed fields of my home to join you on the waves.

Today you visited me at the lab, eyes combing over our shelves of samples like we had combed the beach for shells before I brought you back with me. I had looked out over the grey waves, and you told me they were just ripples compared to the currents underneath—the slow pulse of our planet and its deep, cold hunger, threatening to drag me out with the undertow. You splashed in the shallows and I watched. Some ancient instinct kept me back on the safety of the land.

I tried not to look up from the crystal I was dusting—I thought you might startle, I suppose. You don’t know, but I saw you pick up a jar of dust, examine it, read the label, and set it back down. Your frown told me you had mistaken it for beach sand.

You brought me lunch. Tuna salad. Too many ingredients, a testament to your restlessness on the days you spend at home. I’ve seen you sitting at the computer for hours, blank documents in front of you—or worse, papers on the cutting edge of your field, papers you should be writing. But there are no currents for you to measure in the fields around us, and sinking a thermometer into the rolling green hills will tell you nothing.

When it was time for you to leave, you kissed me on the cheek and retreated like the tide. I folded my crystal into your hand before you left, but you barely looked at it. I think you’ll see it later—maybe as you drop it in the cup holder of the car, or maybe weeks from now when you find it in the glove compartment—and if you look closely enough, you’ll see what I saw: clear blue water, shot through with veins of green and purple. A little ocean frozen in time.

It’s not enough, and it won’t be enough, and I know one day you’ll sink away from me and keep pulling back all the way to the shore, dragging me with you to my own death, but for now it’s something: a first raindrop landing on my earthen exterior, threatening to weather it down to nothing.