We were drowned in it, the way you drown in a water-slide or on your way to work. Drowned in the sense of wet and anxious.

The whole time I felt nothing, and I remembered lines from Anchorman. “I’m in a glass case of emotion!”

I laughed to myself so he wouldn’t see.

What I also noticed was the pattern of his blanket. There were underwater images like faded yellow fish and big fluffy leaves, the whole thing was dulled by years of experience and evolution. He said he’d kept this blanket since he was a kid.

So I thought about him as a boy. I imagined him in Batman pajamas snuggling under his new blue sea blanket. Or as a teenager, hiding his first weed purchase under the bed. Or as a man almost, bringing a girl into the room, waiting for her to sit on his bed, play with the blanket, after which they would play under the blanket like kids, muffle the sounds so his mom wouldn’t hear.

It just so happened I played under his sheets last month. It just so happened these walls are thin enough to liberate sound. It happened that his mother is not with us.

I happen to be a marine biologist. I happened to meet a man who accidentally took my non-fat latte on the counter instead of waiting for his own. His impatience intrigued me, alerted me to an urgency I’d never felt in my life. He happened to find me attractive; he told me so an hour later. Within the next hour this immediacy seduced me into the belly of his vast blanket, under its protective fin.

The rest is history in the making. He paid me compliments and I paid for dinner. He liked to drape himself in my long blond hair and pretend he’s part of my body and the hair is his own. I never got it. Nor did I get the way he’d put me on top of some pedestal, get down on his knees like I was made of fine crystal, and shield me from any bad thoughts or bad news or bad habits he had.

In this way I protected myself from any emotional connection to this man who came to worship his sea goddess regularly, leave her sacrifices by her feet religiously, write odes and sonnets in praise of the woman who brought him food and bounty and booty four times a week for the past four weeks and accepted nothing in return but an occasional orgasm.

I never told him the sea was a better lover. It would wrap itself around each line of your body with fingers of enough pressure and breaths just gentle enough. It was as commanding as any good fuck a woman could ask for, especially a woman who spends her life in schools of species disinterested in her curves or her means of communication.

Even then, in the throws of water and something resembling depth, I waited for the light to wrap around me like the blanket tangled around my hips and his mechanical grunts writhing by my ears. I noticed the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, as childlike as the Nintendo system next to an old TV.

The slant of the setting sun in his dusty room revealed a decay I hadn’t seen some weeks ago. It was hard for him now, I could hear it, holding himself up in one tense and extended push-up. He wasn’t a young man anymore. Therein lies the urgency.

I wasn’t a young woman anymore. The anxiety crept into the moist space between our bodies and the sea released me from its choke-hold. If it took a few dinners in exchange for some human communication, I didn’t mind. As hard as he tried he couldn’t protect me from the passage of time, which is indifferent, all-consuming, as heavy as the weight of an ocean.