One-Way Trip to Falling

I was once, a storm hitting the ocean falling into you buoyant

only to disappear, at the margins of our bodies grasping at the edges of our being

only to hide, in your ocean-skin. to dissolve to become nothing but you

to return, washed up against the shore draining into sand looking for new existence — escape,

only to be pulled back, compulsorily, into you always back to you.

Having written this poem, it reminds me of the concept of Oceanic Feeling explored by Sigmund Freud in his work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

The oceanic feeling is a feeling of oneness, where ego boundaries have dissolved.

Freud speculates it to be a ‘religious feeling’, similar to the feeling of the infant before it has managed to create a singular ‘self’, where the boundary between itself and the world (especially, the mother) did not exist.

There may well be a desire for ego-death (a self-destructive impulse) in the pursuit of the oceanic feeling in adulthood. A desire to feel oneness again.

Romantic love, then, is the dance between two desires: the desire for oneness and the desire for self.