I awoke late into the afternoon, cloaked in clammy anxiety, under blankets like icy sheets of rain. My dreams had sapped any rest from my sleep; though now all that remained was their perfumed haze, clouding my mind. My head felt full of fog. Just one sole thought gleamed there, apparent, and even then just for a second. It was a flash, a silver fish in murky waters.

I don't think I want to wake up again.

That shred of silver clarity, wrenched from view by a bludgeoning tide. A wave, stinging with salt and force.

I don’t think I want to wake up ever again.

It would be all too easy to just tell you my past thoughts of ending things. My relationship to "life," reclining on a therapist's couch in an Olympic throne room, among fellow deities like "intimacy" and "self-worth". Quite frankly, I think the immediacy of my decision should tell you enough. (But I hope it doesn't. I hope you hem and haw and wring your hands down to dusty stumps trying to assume or deduce enough about my life to feel comfortable pressing on.) Really, it doesn’t matter. The facts of my life shouldn't matter as much as the story of my death.

I was fortunate enough to live within walking distance of an oceanic shoreline, a fact I didn't take advantage of enough in life, I fear. So, on this particular dark and stormy afternoon, I would atone for my mistake. I would don my shoes, and shuffle down the ghost-town asphalt streets, off the ashy sands into the icy embrace. Walking off the edge of the world, perhaps the oldest suicide method there was.

Something about that thought struck me as... not funny, exactly, but universally understandable, the same way it's understood what "the world's oldest profession" or "the one word an owl can say" are. Longhand euphemism? Not sure. Rare. They're rare. My ashen brain can only conjure those two parallel examples. Maybe I've found a third, a diamond among dry sand.

Maybe spreading it to the world was some... purpose of mine.

I felt that thought snag, and then harden, into a singular fishhook of regret in my gut, nearly staying my death-march. Unraveled a red line, anchoring me back to the land, back home. Back to the sharply cold sheets, like stone, I was born into, anew, morning after morning. I was far beyond caring about those connections now, though. The reel could keep up its lazy unfurling with each step I took. It could buzz on and on in the back of my mind, until either the line snapped or I ran out of steps to take. Nothing would stop me now.

I rounded the final corner. Before me lay a strip of sad gray sand, packed down by the weight of the low-hanging sky. And beyond, just as colorless but with infinitely more spirit... Churning. Shapeless. Moon-catching, pearl-spitting, choking. Water of the tomb.

From somewhere, the phrase "cradle to the grave" sprung to mind.

And all the while, as my brain spat those sparks, a lantern in the kindling wind, I shuffled closer to the waves.

Beat-up old sneakers, inundated with salinity and molten icy daggers.

The intertidal sand gummed up the works. Dragging my feet became harder and harder (though lifting them for each step was an impossibility) as the earth tried in vain to slow me on my way out the door.

Won’t you stay? It seemed to beg. Won’t you stay, or at least think about this a little bit longer?

For the briefest moment, I paused. The freezing waves crashed just above my knees, numbing me; but the cold was worst when the water receded and left its scummy scars soaked into my pant legs, like tide lines on a pier.

I don’t want to think any more.

I parried the land’s final bid for connection, and shuffled onwards towards the horizon.

The water was up to my waist. The surface no longer broke but simply shivered, numbingly cold and coherent, and... Nice. It felt nice. Not so biting. More comforting, so soothing compared to the inconsistently icy winds of the surface. It’s funny. I never noticed it until now, until I found this better way to freeze, but it was really colder above the water than it was below. The wind would blow, and it’d cut through your clothes and flesh alike to scrape your bones; but then you’d relax with the air until those hating razors started screaming again. Under the surface, the cold is constant. You never let your guard down, and so you never get quite so hurt. It’s nice. All-consuming, but it feels nice.

So, I kept going.

The wavering surface brushed its razor’s kiss against my ribs. It had long since consumed my fingers, and had just begun to sap sensation from them. With the water black as it was under these gray skies, and my sense of touch drained, most of my body was now inscrutable. For all I knew, I could have reformed into a solid cube, or whipping ribbons like tentacles, or a million more terrifying forms, at least from the ribs down. Above water, I was undeniably as human as I ever was.

Perhaps it brought me comfort to imagine my human form disintegrating. Out of sight—finally, broken from the continuous state of being perceived—I might now be any number of things. Most people would look upon me, now just a head and shoulders perched upon the surface, and imagine humanity continuing below the waves. But there had to be someone—even just one disturbed mind—who would see what they could of me, and imagine something monstrous and unseen below the waves. At least, I hoped someone like that was out there.

I know it’s terribly narcissistic, to wish for someone to be so pained or unwell that I’d make sense to them, but I couldn’t help it. I needed some comfort, no matter how slight, and I sought it in the churning metamorphosis. A churning metamorphosis, that might grant me some measure of coherence between mind and body. An unknown body matches a mind most people won’t know, and an inhuman form matches a soul treated as invalid. I might be a repulsive, stinking mass with a human face (for that was all that remained above the waves, now; my face and neck) and to be honest, that’s about all that could justify the way I lived.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. The cosmic horror in our reality is nothing so dramatically relieving as a warping of flesh. We must live on with these spines, achingly upright beyond our station; and if we hold any greater significance, it is in our tragic climb up (or down, it really doesn’t matter) the spiral staircase of tragedy.

I began to regret my wordless departure. I had left no note, for a multitude of reasons. I despise self-explanation—always have, ever since I was small. But beyond that aspect of my personality, I think I’m just… fine with, yes, fine with any conclusions my disappearance leads those in my life to draw. I’d like to think no one around me was so deluded as to assume I’d run off seeking adventure, or a better life. In life on the land, I never would have indulged in such romantic fantasies.

Well, maybe not “never,” but those delusions of grandeur were far in my past. I wasn’t that kind of crazy, not anymore.

When did my feet stop moving? When the water first hit my chin? The cold was shocking, the more of my body it swallowed up, but feeling myself dissolve was comforting. So why did I ever pause?

The answer, of course, was that I never had. The water greedily gnawed its way to my lips, my nose, and onward; I just didn’t have to walk anymore. Feeling had fled my feet while I shuffled forth. Each step was automatic, like a breath; I just couldn’t feel them anymore. Left, right, in, out, again and again—it all just faded into the numbing maw of the wintry sea after a while.

Wintry. Was it winter? The water was cold, but was it obscenely, screamingly cold? Or did it just shock by contrast to the muggy above? Wintry… Wintertree. A city, one I had visited once, ironically enough in summer. It rained the whole time. Was it raining now? I only remembered the sheet of gray above.

I wouldn’t ever find out, it seemed. The lapping surface finally drank me down; ran its rippling tongue over the top of my head, and dragged my last dregs to its depths. One last jolt of cold, the burning air meeting the freezing sea, and I was gone.

I saw nothing. Instinctively, I had closed my eyes to the stinging salt when the surface first stretched above my cheekbones, but I had gotten used to the sting now. Or at least, I couldn’t feel it. Could my eyes have grown numb? They didn’t feel numb; they didn’t tingle like my fingers or legs, but they didn’t burn either, like they had just above the surface. They… throbbed. Not painfully. Fully. Like they were full of pulsating tears, welling up against the sea, their cousin in salinity.

I was never one to hide my tears. It’s just that I felt no need to cry. Once or twice a year or so, something crushing or frustrating would get to me, and I’d get that burning up my cheeks and jelly-ness in the corners of my vision, but the tears never quite fell. They’d just hang there, warp my sight for a while, and dry up. The heat would fade from my face just as cleanly and with as little relief. And I’d go on like nothing happened, because nothing had.

And it clearly wasn’t a matter of shame or anything. I could have felt how I did in front of anyone, stranger or family, or in front of no one at all; and I had, too. It just didn’t matter. I clearly didn’t care, not enough to make myself cry, nor enough to swallow the tears up in gulping blinks. Even now, shrouded in the murky sea’s saline deniability, surrounded by tears, my own refused to flow. They stayed curled, as beaded pearls, refusing to mix with the water surrounding me.

I couldn’t do a thing about it. I could have bludgeoned myself with a thousand tragedies, rubbed salt in a million wounds, and still the tears wouldn’t fall. So why bother?

It’s not like there was anything to see down there anyway.

Well. There was plenty there, of course; a teeming murk, full of flecks so alive and primordial. Less “swimming” and more “flying through the water”. Most were little more than churning biological rotors, or wriggling ribbons, or similarly living means of propulsion. Every once in a while, something more shapeless dragged itself into view, taking the shards of life before it into itself like a puddle-shaped vacuum cleaner. The stark cleanliness in its wake was… startling, to say the least, among such—so much—life. A grim reminder, perhaps, of what “nothing” really is.

Death is, itself, not dead. Before the Reaper was clean bone and iron sickle, it was bloated, crawling, black with lifeblood gone to rot. All those gleaming, intricate skeletons were once corpses; and then, too, they held a doll-like beauty, a beauty of death. In between those states, though, they were churning and fertile. Foul? Absolutely. But, invariably, alive; or at least cloaked in life. Covered in disgusting life, performing a final strike against entropy. Passing on all heat. By the very nature of entropy, though, this is a useless rite. It’s a strike against entropy, with the sword of tragedy. Does that make it immoral to rot? I don’t know. Consciously, I don’t know. And subconsciously…

Perhaps there still was a hope for my impressionistic side. Perhaps I chose to drown myself with images of bloated corpses and picked-apart whale bones in mind; stamps of oceanic hyper-rot. But I don’t think I was ever that lovingly illogical. Romance was truly dead, within myself at least; coldly and skeletally dead. I was either:

1. Too scared to be alluring in death, as either an undistorted corpse or a perfectly formed skeleton; or

1. I was Mephisting myself to Oceanus; casting my body to salt in hopes of evading the rotting tragedy.

In the former case, I was a wretched coward. The latter case would cast me as most knowledgeable and yet most foolish, most unlearned of tragedy.

Unlearned of tragedy. Of course I was! I was nothing so reprehensible as a literary scholar. I hated nothing more than the repeated morals of the story; except perhaps the self-righteous conviction with which the story is often told. The experience of reading one was made all the more frustrating with how proudly the author wore the moral as a badge of glorious purpose. Even if they worked as “cool” aesthetic outings, that was worse! Far worse, for the narcissistic way they screamed the author’s tastes above anyone else’s.

I felt, suddenly, very relieved I had left no note, and equally anxious about my footprints in the sand. Would they be read as some attempt at the six-word story? Some wordless, cloying shot to the heart? Goddammit, I hope not.

No, if I wanted to make someone cry, I would waste so many words to do it. Burn out, not fade away. Live excessively in the face of emotional entropy. I don’t think I had the courage to be so debauched, though.

Why am I not dead yet? It had been at least five minutes. I don’t know if I should have drowned; I couldn’t say if I’d been breathing or not, for how strong the numbness in my chest was. But therein lay the problem; if my chest was so numb, hypothermia should have killed me. At the very least, oxygen deprivation should have done something.

Can I just die already?

I should have been unconscious and dreamless and unable to think these torturous thoughts. Where is the red heat upon these irons coming from?

Had I become another of those great greedy amoebae, sucking down life in my wake? I didn’t think so; the water wasn’t so murky that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and of course I checked. Checked to see that my hand was still there. It was, of course. Of course.

Silent. Gentle. The reprimand, the reminder. I will not change shape. My life would contain no great metamorphosis, and investigating the idea was… narcissistic, at best.

Is it? The query from the back of my mind rang out. Is it? And what’s so bad about that if it is?

Tempting. Tempting me. I wouldn’t pull that serpentine thread. That thread, scrying the self, the inky mirror framed by an iron snake. I attempt to see nothing beyond that which rises to the surface.

What rises to the surface… None of my planktonic points of fascination rose to the surface so driftingly. If they ascended, they did so unwaveringly, in straight lines. Flying, propulsing, churning, never drifting. The great amoebae… even more so, they cut through space. And these, I thought, are the lowest, most primal forms of life. The impressions of flecks. Nothing but a cloud to my untrained eye.

I’d known these unseeable things were there. Of course they were. Everyone knows that. But, on days when I awoke merely feeling like lesser life—not bending in the wind, stronger in the sea breeze than a will-less and wicked willow—in those better days, I didn’t consider their implications. What did they feel like, in their hollow melancholy?

Nothing?

I suddenly felt very wretched, and stupid to boot. The burning in my face returned, despite the endless Styx icily swaddling me. They hadn’t the forms to feel anything. Dust particulate, no matter how alive, cannot feel. They had no brains, or at least not any complex enough to feel anything.

But another part of me thought that perhaps that is why they could not feel. That because I disregarded the planktonic mass, their perception did not exist. If I had thought of them, or outside myself at all, even in search of something Truly lowlier than I felt, then maybe I could have found something. But no. The net I cast was so narrow that it spiraled into itself and became irreversibly tangled, worsening the more I tried to unwind it all. Only the gentle drift the sea-foam rode could have saved me now; not the still water of Narcissus I scried for salvation.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

But I think, then, the sea did start to save me. Through my reflexive steps and the cleansing of my bone-soaked lungs, I was being cleansed. Whether or not the plankton thought, my contemplation and contemptful impression led to the same result—that I lay there, day after day, on my matted, mossy mattress, feeling pathetic because I wouldn’t look to be wrong. I wouldn’t look for my self-judgement to be wrong. In that, I was like the very same narcissistic vampires, the writers I despised, self-confident to a point of pride aimed omnidirectionally at the sky and my own vital organs.

Like spines. Those repellent thorns in the desert. Forced down my throat at every opportunity, as some sign that “spoke so deeply” of humanity’s nature. And to me, they said nothing. Not that they were mute, of course; like any art piece, they screamed out to be seen, and like any art piece, rang hollow to me. I would be remiss to disqualify that as sound, but it failed to resound, to resonate.

But the hollow thing that tried to ring out back then? That was me. That was the sound of a doll being touched, and being too devoid of even emptiness to notice. Realizing that nearly crushed me entirely. As it was, something still throbbed, rotten, in my chest.

My only salvation came as a distraction, decayed and saw-bladed, against my ankle at that moment. A crab shell, picked clean by something-or-other—an octopus, I supposed—and tossed to the current. Its legs, like limp icepicks in the subaquatic wind. It parodied the sidewards scuttle of its life, animated again against the incremental struggle projected by its infinitely tinier cousins, the plankton. Cave paintings sprung to mind, illuminated and alive by the firelight; but I quickly repressed that impression. This was rot where that was rock; and besides, I was a human of modern times. I had no need for stick pictures on walls, and never seen them by the light of a fire besides, so it was disingenuous for me to even have that impression.

Once again, I felt lowly. A fluke, a flatworm, drifting along the salty waves until I find an idea to latch onto and suckle blood from and bleed it dry. All to keep my leeching form alive amidst shriveling salinity. Pathetic. Undeserving of life, but unworthy of a death that would be mercy; so, I just kept on living. The life of a stupid, tiny insect.

As my brain flayed and hated, some node within called out for me to pick up the crab shell—which, of course, I did not do. It would have been damnably cliché. But I was still undeniably panged when the octopus returned; I knew why it flew so, like a carpet above the bloated sea-sand. With its mass, that rug of flesh sucked down the carapace with speed sufficient to turn it to dust; and just as quickly, the octopus vanished again. The only sign that it was ever present was the scrambling panic cast over the plankton who bore witness.

Of course, I could only think of myself. Spiral into my own regrets. I wish I’d picked up that crab shell. I wish I’d taken some relic of death, filthy and crawling, into my cleanly living hands.

The irony nearly choked me, then: the irony that my hands, stained waxy pale and soaked in frozen ocean, might be the “more alive” of the two. Between myself and that limp shell, I, the mechanical marcher, was the living one, and that chaotic dancer was dead.

Even in death, that creature was a beautiful swimmer, and even in life, I couldn’t replicate the soft warmth of humanity.

Replicate. Even I knew it. The tenderest brush strokes and tricks of the trade, the turns of phrase that stick through rippling years and the simplest rituals of romance. I had to try at performing them, copying the warped examples around me. From the start, I was never human in any way that mattered. I was just as hollow as that carapace, but too weighed down by the expectation of living to dance so beautifully.

I’m without a will, but too alive to bend to the swirling consciousness around me.

It was so cliché I could just puke. “Immortality is a real curse.” “A situation where death would be a blessing.” Having no mouth, and feeling a welling scream. I’ve heard it all before, and yet...

Something clicked, or else snapped, something like a branch jutting from my brain stem.

This time, I really understood the point. Or maybe it’s better to say that I felt it. Because, at that moment, I truly did feel trapped between life and death, walking with no will, a heart beating for no reason, and I hated it. I hated the rock and hard place pulling me apart, Scylla and Charybdis raging inside me. Let one oceanic maw or the other make flesh mulch out of me, I thought. Let this living body disintegrate in the turbulent surf, or dissipate in the crushing cold, or be swallowed wholly by some inky purple abyss. Just let it be gone, and let nothing remain, or if physicality may remain, let it be a fascinating dancer.

As quickly as those feelings set their numbing fangs of haze into me, they spat me out again; and as I ceased my ouroboric scrying, my bare-handed tunneling to the center of the mind, the world before me came into view. Back into view, I should say. Because it was always there, I was just too hating to see it.

From my shuffling steps, a cloud of ashen purple tendrils curled skyward, like smoke in the wake of my death-march. They mesmerized me, those simple spirals; perhaps as a reflection of myself, losing codified shape and falling into disgustingly flowery romanticism the deeper I trudged. Or maybe they were truly fascinating shapes. Nothing so empty as myself, simply will ‘o the wisps not-yet-wicked. That had to be it. Those drifting curls threatened to pull me in, the same way I so-narcissistically fell into my own thoughts. Fell in? No—I was pulled in then, too, into my own head.

By the very nature of the thing, this first presence of resonance, I couldn’t tell that I was literally falling too, until it was too late. Or perhaps I had become so wrapped up in my own wretched effects on the world to notice the sheer drop off the continental shelf.

Either way, that hating blindness flooded back into me. It soaked my clothes that should have been fully inundated already (Was this was a colder and darker and heavier substance than water, I wondered, some abyssal material that saps heat so fast none who know it live to tell the tale?) But, no, regardless of impression, this was the same old sea that had been swallowing me all along, all my life, really.

All my life. That’s... No, that’s not right. If only I’d been thrown to the ocean, coldly cut from hope and from the clinging life that thrives in the muggy surface air, maybe things wouldn’t have to be this way. Maybe I could just drift away physically, drift as my mind always has, will-lessly bending as a willow. Maybe if I hadn’t grown so many writhing roots and red strings, dying would be easier.

It’s so tiring.

With all these grafted attachments, moving on was a strain. With all these forced connections, my veins tied to the land, I had to fight to find peace.

And the worst part is, now that I’ve visualized that connection, it’s that much harder to keep moving. Almost like thinking it brought it closer to physicality.

At the same time, if I had just ignored my... guilt? Regret? I don’t even think there’s a word for it. “Smothered hope” sprang to mind. Hope for what could have been. If I had just ignored it, that wouldn’t have been any better. It would have just festered in some void of Akashic dark matter with all the other unknown ideas and unthought thoughts, and being as (and where) I was, I couldn’t bear the idea that I could be responsible for such desolation.

Empathy for the abstract, I thought, and immediately regretted it. I didn’t want to even leave footsteps on the shore for fear of being interpreted as poetically suffering; so why should I get to wear that tragic mask as I actually die? I may be gnarled—mentally—beyond belief, but at least I don’t have some kind of savior complex about myself.

Let the record show that I had no love for most people; as little as I had for myself. I didn’t hate them all that much; unless someone did something to slight me, I simply assumed most people to be, as a baseline, “better than me”. But I wasn’t ever so groveling as to love my betters, and if my obituary tells you otherwise, then that’s another lie (in good company with the idea that I will be missed.)

Well, that assumes I’ll get an obituary, which honestly, I hope I don’t. For one, I’m still not dead yet. (Right?) But I’d genuinely rather be forgotten completely than remembered in the tainted light of mourning.

I’m far from the first person to notice this, but the recently deceased seem to have never done anything wrong. When you die, your mourners make you out to be saintly, with an amount of fervor inverse to their proximity to you in life.

Death makes people dishonest. If anyone were really so great, so missed, hell, so loved, as the recently deceased, they wouldn’t stay dead. Their radiant life would inspire countless ordinary people to the seat of the “Modern Prometheus”, casting away their own existence in pursuit of a nostalgic flame. All because “ordinary people” aren’t so good as to simply miss someone they once loved.

Every solar step they took would result in, ultimately, the baking heat upon the rock. Every warm day they lived, another liver-load of poison down the throat of an eagle.

And the eagle’s plight. A bird of prey, an innocent creature wont to fly and hunt, chained to a prisoner of blessed fate; itself fated to guzzle condemnation and toxin day in and day out.

Can someone who would birth so much suffering by their virtue really be called virtuous?

I see myself as the eagle, as the punishment; and so, selfishly see the eagle as the most victimized. Or maybe I see the eagle as the most victimized, and identify with that? No, that’s too—far too—kind, for someone like I, lacking a spine. Lacking anything to say. Lacking anything to care about more than my own morality, or sense of self, or the wretched dance of the two.

No, I don't think that's right either. I don't think I'm starved for identity; if I were, I'd beg for the scraps of narcissistic aesthetic indulgence, the skin-deep picking, present in the short story.

Praise the flame, ignore the fuel. So perhaps I, the firewood, the eagle, set myself adrift rather than alight. Ruined myself to escape the burning purpose.

Absolutely no one would admire me for that, I think. And I think that's a good thing.

But why?

I don't want to know. I know I don't want to know. But... it's probably some urge to push everyone away. I don't want to draw admirers; I want to repel them. Not because I'm scared to let them down with how woefully inadequate I am, though that would undoubtedly happen. I'm scared of them letting me down with their logical betrayal. When they find out just how unworthy I am, and rightly leave, I'm scared of having lost them. I think. Who knows, maybe the reason is far simpler than I'm assuming it to be, but I just have to be some complex, unique little mystery.

I am, even if only to myself. I don't know how I feel.

I can never know how I feel. Only keep asking myself. It's like... It's like my mind is fractured into different people, pushing and pulling each other apart.

How many, then? Two, animus and anima? Three? The id, ego, and superego? Five, the sum of those ideas? Or the product, ten? Or are there just countless tiny fragments of everyone I've ever known, insignificant against the sea of entropy that makes up "me"?

Shut up! I screamed within my head. It didn't matter, just as I was taught. It didn't matter how I felt about the situation, only the facts of it. So, what were the facts?

I felt sick to my stomach; but that was likely just a psychosomatic symptom. My mind playing tricks. Scratch that off the list. I was in the ocean. That was a fact. I tried to kill myself, and somehow failed... Well, that can't really be considered a fact.

I'm so tired. Caring so much about facts and so little about their impressions, their effects, I felt less human than ever. But beyond that, I couldn't tell you how I felt. Just how I didn't feel, and how I didn't feel human.

Like a robot? Like a machine? The questions sprang to mind, lashing around, reflexively scavenging for an explanation when I didn't have one. I could have picked myself apart looking for an answer with a vulture-beak scalpel, but I was so tired.

I drifted, or sank, or floated, downwards for a while longer in mental silence. An uneasy mental silence, a fragile one that threatened to break like a pond's mirrored surface. My first instinct was to try to stop thinking; but after a while some part of me rebelled against that. Not thinking isn't the kind of thing you can try to do. So I listened, and allowed myself to think if a thought came to, which of course they did. They were mostly too blurred to be put to words, save a few, and even those were vague memories. Someone telling me about meditation, how to do it, and why, and various related sound bites, images, and the like. Bits like scraps from books. I couldn't say when they were from, or where. I had no proof they were even my own memories; maybe someone just told me all these things, all at once.

The way "people don't do in real life". That was one of my recurring weapons in my war against genre fiction in life. Exposition. "People don't talk like that in real life." Maybe they should. Maybe life would be better if people shared useful, or interesting, information with each other. Maybe if people talked about what they thought about more, life would be better.

Maybe they did, and I just never noticed.

I felt coldest of all, then.

At last, I hit the deathly cold muck at the sea floor. Soft rot. A floor, alive, and nothing like the proverbial rock-bottom. Still, I couldn't sink any more. I had stopped; and it was like the muffled impact flipped a switch in the back of my mind.

I had a truly hollow self, I realized then. Empty of everything, even cold water. Devoid of purpose to serve as ballast, and subject to the whims of the current or the breeze. Just another shell of a human, rushed off to meet a psychopomp upon the sea...

I felt a freezing pressure all around me, liquid water filled with illusory chunks of ice. And I could see nothing at this depth darkest and farthest from the sun. Like I should. This is how it is, at the bottom of the sea. There's nothing to save me here. There's nothingness, here, to save me.

It was like space, cold and dark, but so unlike space, for how full it was! Full of water black as writhing death, and full of wriggling life. I looked down at my arm—it glowed. Just for a second; the pale green had smothered itself in my vision; but when I looked away, I could sense the light return. Not just to my arm, either; my whole body was wreathed in cold flame, but only when I couldn't see it.

I feel strangely ashamed to admit that. I'm probably going nuts, but I felt it. Even if the glow couldn't be real, I felt it.

At a time, I was hollow. But hollow things don't sink. Even the plankton had enough substance to keep churning below the surface.

It’s funny—when you think of the beauty of the undersea, you probably think of vivid coral reefs, coherent masses of life like glowing stone. Millions of tiny, vivid colors, and one overwhelming light. But I saw a very different picture. A picture of the blue and the gray and the bleached medium between, all dancing with the lanterns.

Ragged sheets of cloudy life streamed in the current, forming writhing clouds. Limbs, jagged and jointed, innumerably sprouting from the greatest appendages. Living lights, like glowing faeries, trailing tentacles of stinging smoke. Bloated messes of fish-flesh, playing host to bristling teeth that still seemed delicate as glass shards. The Earth's lifeblood bubbled up and curled on the undersea breeze. Heat—the only heat—screamed from a million tiny hellmouths. There was an eel that appeared to be nothing but an origami maw and a single black streamer; there were fish like giant beaked leeches, writhing in the mud; there were stony towers, tipped with pink lips puckered up at the surface. Lanky squids, trailing limp limbs as strings from mantles like mobiles. Stout crimson masses, like elegant velvet umbrellas, dropped and drifting in the watery wind. Thin glass tubes, swimming and bending without shattering somehow. Like magic. There were bones, too; so many complete skeletons between them. (As complete as a skeleton can be, anyway.) Whale bones picked clean, gleaming a screaming ivory, and fish bones specked with scraps of rot. Cartilaginous skeletons tainted with gray, themselves deep in the throes of decay. The dead, the living, all in a dance together. Lights of life, flitting within and without, through the gaps in ribs they used to occupy.

It was a nightmare. It was a dream. It was dark and beautiful and it was the "judgement of the awakening". Isn't it funny? I couldn't tell you where I heard that, or read it... where I picked up that phrase; but it was there all the same, pocketed in my brain like a glimmering stone or dropped coin. Maybe I got it from the impossible life around me, that I knew existed but never felt so much awe at, and connection with.

In each monstrous form, I saw myself, the way others might see their reflection in a painting.

Self-discovery, oneness with nature... It's as cliche as anything in those stories. The ones that repulsed me so, with how much I'd "heard it all before." Sure, maybe I had; but I hadn't felt it. I hadn't felt a thing. I was so much number before I felt the cold water.

Now I could rhyme with the old mariners, but even they wouldn't find me. I might have been able to stomach a story, if words could reach me, if ink wouldn't flee and paper wouldn't crumple apart long before reaching me. I could never surface. I had plundered the jar too greedily, and couldn't withdraw my hand without losing myself. I cannot return, cannot atone for these wasted years, not with this constraining fullness—no, purpose—intact.

...Well, it's not ideal, but I guess I'll start a new canon down here. I could do that. I'm stranded physically, but no longer so alienated mentally. I'll create stories I would have hated, stories from the bottom of the sea, and write them in my mind. Forever.

-Fin-

The preceding tale was submitted to the Mind's Eye Archives posthumously... and yet, immediately after a birth of sorts. Out of all the stories to never be told, it stood out to this archivist. Perhaps it's the unintentional recognition of our work, feeding my ego; or maybe it's just interesting because I'm bored. Or maybe, hey, it is actually good. I certainly felt it, and I guess if anything is to be taken from this tale, that is the only meaning.

I know this kind of note ought to be an introduction, but it's not useful for organizational purposes, and besides it's best to contemplate in retrospect. Still, if you found this little story and spent time with it, within a sea of its contemporaries... Well, thank you.