Blue

I dive in hands first then head followed by heart, feet last. The cool blue envelopes me, my face submerged. The worlds clamour is now hushed, dimmed almost to nothing. I push downwards, feeling the strength in my arms, a fluid stroke. My body, my heart, is soothed, caressed by the silky smooth water. I am held in its density, supported, I relax, letting myself glide forward. I stay underneath the surface, breath held, pushing down again, deeper. 

I watch the mottled patchwork of refracted sunlight on the sandy bed. It dances and shifts underneath me, I cast a shadow, a piece of the world blacked out by my mass. I feel as though I am that shadow, a ghost, an insubstantial form that is made up only by the absence of light. I want to be the nebulous darkness drifting free at the bottom of the ocean, hidden. Not this human with a heart full of explosives, this pain that washes through me in waves. With this mind that whirs incessantly, a constant undermining hum.

I want to stay under. Not to come up for air again. I want to stay in the safety and comfort of this, liquid world. Want to be rocked to sleep by the undulating undertow, I want to be washed in and out by the tide with no will of my own, no choosing. I stretch out my limbs, and drift upwards still face down. Floating now like I’m dead, looking down into the blue, I surrender myself to sea. One, two, three more moments left before my survival instincts kick in and I roll over to breathe a deep lungful of air. Lying on my back, arms wide, blue above as it is below. 

So immaculately blue, it pierces my soul. I remember that our beautiful blue sky is the result of looking at darkness through light. In that moment I’m aware of this halo of light around the earth a few miles thick and then dark cold space outside it. Isn’t it miraculous how all light is reflected? And where there is nothing to reflect it there is only black. How we are surrounded and bathed in so much light in our atmosphere just because of all the tiny particles that reflect it all over the place.

I drop under the skin of the ocean again, this time looking up at the surface. I wonder if I exist without reflection, do I become that dark shadow when no one is looking? When no one is loving me. I want to stay under this skin, stay inside, peaceful and quiet, effortless. But life is not as death, there is not pure and perfect stillness alone, it is accompanied by, married to change and motion and the play of a million opposites. We feel the heave and lurch in our guts of the ups and downs, we are thrown and pulled, affected, impacted. 

I let the gentle sway of waves lull me, feeling my heart beat in harmony with the pulse of this vast body of water. I ask the sea to have me, I ask the sky to have me, I ask life to have me back again and I promise to try and actually live rather than pretend I am dead. I’m not gone yet, but still here, here in this blue, blue, blue......