This indecision turns my mind from sanity to salinity. The ocean beckons. The ocean wins. 

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I wade first to my ankles, then knees. The riptide tries to uproot me, pulling at my legs like an insistent mermaid, easing me away from the land. 

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There’s no point struggling, not even if I wished to, so I lay back in the water and stretch. It’s a languid departure, watching the clouds drift past, or me past them. 

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I do not sink. I thought I’d sink!

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As a leaf upon the water of life, I neither crinkle nor crisp. I merely am. And for a time, I’m happy. 

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The stars do not silently appear, nor do they pop into existence one at a time, they explode. In celestial bursts of diamond brilliance, the night becomes a beacon to the lost and the dreamers. To someone such as me, it’s heaven. What I wouldn’t give to drown.

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Slowly, an argent moon breaches the undulating waves like the great white whale himself. Had Melville journeyed this way?

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I am overcome with melancholy, a desire to turn over and breathe in the ocean. But the world below is as the world above, just a little less distinctive and a little less blasé. So, I wait, as I have always waited. Time moves on. 

 

To those of my kind, a night can be a moment, or aeons. I no longer remember which. The stars shine in remorseless perpetuity, the argent moon never dimming. I am lost, but do I still dream?

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There is no sign of the ocean dissipating until the seafloor jags into my back and I flounder, falter, and eventually fall.

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The Earth crumbles atom by atom until I hang in the space it occupied like a bat without a cavern roof. There is nothing. I am nothing. Oh, what bliss!

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It is not Her that comes for me, but the moon. As a pillow, it rises from beneath and eases me into the stars. They tickle at my face like cobwebs, or so I imagine. 

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My father called me a lost soul, a good-for-nothing dreamer. That I came from nothing and would return to nothing. I say to him: So what!

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