Dancing with Death

The sea was milk-white beneath the roiling winter sky, shifting irresolutely, as childishly, as a quivering maple leaf on a bare branch. Rain burst on skin like chips of ice, stinging already salty eyes and dampening quivering lips. Rather than leaping from the cliff face, the figure huddled where he stood, bitterly glaring at the darkening horizon, the soles of his feet tingling as they urged to jump.
Jump. He eyed what lay, thousands of metres beneath him, flat and mobile as an impressionist painting. Sheer icy rock lay directly beneath, gritty sand, black from the rain, and then the foam of the surf. The salt of tears crusted his face, a salt he wanted to feel all over him, allow it to seep into the warmth of his body and still his aching pulse. The darkness of death and pillars of salt, shattering him into a million pieces as he drifted beneath the surface of the waiting sea. He shifted forward on the balls of his feet, arms thrown dramatically to his sides, the wind forcing his hair to dance a frantic tarantella as his heart fiercely rebelled against his purpose. Perhaps he could simply still himself and allow his heart to burst with fear and ecstatic release, it seemed to be on the brink of doing so, and would save himself the snap second of decision that shivered ever closer.
Beyond everything he wished he could hear the sea. The wind flushed against skin like harsh slaps, stopping him from hearing the water as it caressed the sand. That was enough to give him pause, and of their own accord his itching feet began inching away from the cliff edge. And then he saw it.
The tangle of seaweed, innocuous, bland, a dot on the beach far beneath him. It was the only sign of life, and even so it seemed so dead, its limbs sadly drifting and snapping as the tide smashed it again and again into the waiting rocks. And yet it danced mercilessly, spinning in the surf and dipping beneath the icy surface of the water as it waved up at him invitingly. The terrific spirit of it engulfed his senses and he found himself leaning towards it, eyes wide with tears and icy rain, hands clutching at the broiling wind even as it stole his breath away. To be so alive, and yet so unaware. To be so frosty cold inside, yet so warm with constant dance.
Without intention, under the spell of the frigid countenance of the weed, his feet slipped. His eyes snapped away from the seaweed and fastened on the sky as his mouth stretched in a howl of fear, fingers uselessly plucking for anything- anything. But nothing touched his fingertips, and without another sound- or was there sound? The wind is so loud- the figure plunged deep, deep into the heartless blackness of the salt below. And dance he did, forever more, his hands waving and head lolling, the seaweed he had so admired wrapped around his skin and tightening into a noose as it tethered him to the black sand, remaining long after the flesh melted away from bone and he fell, quietly, to scatter.