Storytime: , or Swim.

December 16th, 2015

It’s not that I didn’t try to swim, you understand. I tried very hard. I tried very hard for a long time. For a VERY long time. It felt like forever and it burned down through my arms and into my back and when it hurt too much to move and then to think I just stopped.
It can happen.
Now, it was what happened after that that began to convince me. When I sat there, swirling in the current, and I knew I couldn’t feel the rippling of my sleeves in the water. I couldn’t feel the cold anymore. I just felt heavy and full and tired. Do you know how you feel after a big meal? That overbloated exhaustion? The kind that makes sleep crawl in through every pore in your skin?
Imagine that, but never sleeping. That’s close to it. That’s what it feels like, sinking.

It was a fast current – a cold one, though of course I couldn’t tell that anymore – and it kept me upright and away, gave me time to see and watch the others. They were heavier than I was; kept on the trek downwards by boots and bags and bullets and they might’ve nodded to me, if they were as me. I think they were.
There were others, of course. They weren’t sinking. They had fins and frills and wide eyes that never shut and gasping, grasping mouths. I was repulsed at first, when they took their pounds of flesh. But then I saw how little it mattered, how useless the extra parts of me, of all of us were now. It was just weighing us up, holding us aloft in the current and jangling in indecision.
One by one, down they went. A salute to each of them, and a salute back. Imagined, of course. And then they were gone, and it was just me. I must not have been very tasty. I certainly hadn’t been, alive.

I can’t tell you how long or far my trip was. Down there it’s all twilight or midnight, wobbling over and under the line of light as the seafloor crawls up and down under your feet.
Sometimes I was swept above it by chance and the world was so painfully blue that it couldn’t be imagined on any painter’s pallet or living eye, a swallowing deepness that ate all detail of up and down, right and wrong, and didn’t even let fish-scales sparkle in it.
Sometimes I fell deeper, where my company had little lanterns on their brows and strange mouths too big to fit in their faces, faces that would’ve fit in my palms if I had them. I watched the snowflakes of rain fall from above, all the scraps and crumbs of the world flushed down, down, down with me and over me. Some of my own skin and flesh and bone always accompanied it, drifted downwards.
It’s a strange sight, but you get used to it once you understand it. Everything sinks. Even the little fish that swam up above me every now and then; I saw them sink. Even the fattest-bodied, full-blubbered whale slid down past me like the world’s biggest freight train, once enough of it had been picked off to let the bones ballast the carcass. Even the most magnificent ships; they sink too. I was never so lucky as to catch one in the motions, but I saw them pass overhead once in a rare while, and underfoot more often. Their bellies strained with the effort of keeping themselves afloat, and I would look at them and think of broken hulls and coral-encrusted cannons, and be sort of cheerily bemused at it.

Eventually, of course, you stop sinking. That’s just how it works, I thought. It’s certainly how it looks.
I brushed against the murk and mud where the weight of the water laid deepest, and what was left of me slid into it very comfortably, gliding through waves of silt that had lain there for… oh who knew. I didn’t.
When I came to a stop, the crabs came. They were very small but very diligent and they removed all of me that was noteworthy down to the last few specks. All that was left, all that I could tell, was stray flecks in sand and a few tatters that had been a coat that had been fibers and hide and metals once upon a time in a very small, very dry place. Quite unusual for the world.
I sat there, and I thought that I had finished. That I could close my eyes – my mind, at least – and consider myself complete. Sunk.
Instead, I slowed.

You can feel the world, at that pace. The deep breaths and slow tug of its magmatic muscles against its rocky skin. The heartbeat of its core. And the long pull dragging you down towards it, to merge lower and lower until you are wrapped up inside it.
There were bones beneath me, I knew this for a certainty more real than fact. They were older than I was capable of thinking. They had sunk.
There were bones before me, I knew that too. They were older still, and they were now stone.
There were bones before them on and on beyond thought, I imagined, but they were gone now. They had sunk farther still, out of the world and time and into them both, melted down below to make the world above.
This was good. This was proper. This was how it worked. And I, who had thought I had learned what I was for on my trip downwards, was content. Because this was how it could be, if that was how it should be.
Until just a moment ago.
There are still no days here, just moments.

But just a moment ago, I saw a shark. It looked happy.
No, not happy. Sharks do not do that, not really. But it was determined, very determined, in that special way that they and only they can be. Mouth just slightly ajar by dint of teeth, eyes set ready, body a twanging defiance of its own urge to sink.
That was a fine thing, but not a new thing. I had seen such sights since the moment I ceased to swim. What puzzled me was the moment after that moment. That moment just a moment ago. It is a hard time to explain and pin down because it was so peculiar.
Just now, I saw a stone that swam.

It was not a large stone. A rough chunk. I think it would’ve been big enough for me to carry, but I find it hard to think of what I was.
But it was moving in the water, wiggling with a force impossible to think of as the air-pockets of pumice, clearly trying very hard.
And it was working.

I sat here, half-buried in the mirk of ages, and I felt the world pulling me down, pulling everything above me down, and I knew that was how it was, and that was how it would be. And it was right to be that way.
But I had just seen a stone that swam.
I thought of the bones beneath me, the bones gone before, and I thought of the bones yet to float from above. I even thought of the quiet exhaustion I had stopped noticing, which was very difficult; like a fish trying to imagine water. I knew this was normal. I knew this was what should be.
But I had just seen a stone that swam.
Miles of water above me. Miles of silt beneath me. I had sunk so far, and I had so far yet to go.
But.

I was so very light now, so very threadbare. A skin-flake and a nub of once-bone too small to see, and a speck that had once been a brass button.
But it was still so very hard to bring myself up, to stir from my place. It had been such a long time since I had tried.

It’s still hard. It’s still so very hard. There is so much beneath me and so much above me, and all of it is falling down, always falling down.

But if even the oldest and heaviest thing in all the world can see something worth swimming for, I thought – I think – that there might be something yet to do.
It’s impossible to try forever. Perhaps I will try for a while.

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