Te0atl does not represent water. It is one of the ways the world thinks.
It enters clear and cold, and as it moves it gathers salts, minerals, plant tissue and signs of living things. Nothing simply rests on the water. Everything becomes part of the same continuum.
First there is moisture and conductivity, before there is any ocean. Then the medium thickens with seaweed, sap and a faint corporeality, as if the salt had learned the temperature of skin.
In the end, something stays wet after the water can no longer be named. We call it phantom damp.
It doesn't smell like the ocean. It smells like something that just came out of it.
