Wow, this seemed a whole lot longer in my editor...

Rainshadow: a region of reduced rainfall on the lee side of high mountains (M-W)

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Rainshadow

He pondered the blue expanse before him, its smooth touch pulling at his gut and twisting it around its fingers. It wasn't so much knowing that the little floating particulates were watching; that the humid air was kissing his lips dry. It really didn't bother him that the unyielding pebbles allowed his arm to sink around them, pulling red, tender skin around their shapes.

No, no, he simply didn't know how.

He'd long stopped eyeing the heating sun, neither thinking of nor caring about how he'd gotten there in the first place - she had once smilingly brought him here, and that association was the only important thing anymore. They'd gazed at each other's faces in the reflective shimmer of the liquid - each watching a different swarm of tiny passing flecks - and she'd suddenly mentioned how their relationship was a lot like it. Cheeks nearly touching, he'd hardly noticed the comment; he, like her (or so he thought), had simply contented himself with tirelessly marveling at the wind-driven flow and payed no heed to the passage of time. Had it already been a year since he'd once again lonesomely wandered over the gardens of Ein Gedi and onto the shores of the desert lake? It felt like five minutes.

The Dead Sea. The name of the body was what baffled him the most. How could something be dead if it had never been alive in the first place? He'd asked her this laughingly, but she hadn't heard him, her eyes already melancholy and covered in the dull crystallization of sodium and chloride. So now, he approached the surface, stared through it to the stillness beneath: eternal abode of the odd insect, several yellowed plants, and the trillions of particulates in limbo, making their way to nowhere. It was these, he saw now, that made it dead; each individual lack of life an osmosing infection until they and the salty brine became the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, he lost the will to resist it.

The water called to him, reached out to him, cradled him in loving arms, keeping him afloat despite the fact that he'd much rather drown. Instead, all he had the lucidity to do was stare back at the beautiful particulates, each living its own unique death yet following him dutifully nonetheless.

He thought one of them looked a lot like Ziva.