Dipping my head below the surface, I will get my hair well wet this time. I will kick from the rock with hardened feet, surge under, and follow the forms I find there. I will trust that I can breathe beneath the surface, where surely I have breathed before.
Down there, the waves of the sea’s weathered surface are but a distant hum; it’s the surface that’s the shadow in a world that’s upside-down. Though muffled from the maddening crowd and sheltered from the storm, the under-sea is not serenely silent, though in its widest-reaching pockets where there are but specks of dust I expect I will seem to be alone.
But below-waves is populated by monsters of the metaphoric deep, all swimming about and moving about in a miasma of myth and its raw matter, the recycled stories of life. A whale, its wide mouth oblivious, merely passing through the soup, will scoop me up – the ambivalence of fate has chosen me to fall.
Once swallowed by the whale, spat out, made formless and reformed, I will drift towards the surface once again, borne by the colder currents, restless, underneath. Slowly, as the sunlight filters ever brighter through the swirl of thought and memory and with the creatures of the ‘tween-space passing through, I will unfurl, and there dwell, drifting, tethered to the deep, in the sunlit submerged kelp-farms of the sea.
Here in this almost-place, I will grow until I am ready to drift free – it is a place of plenty, of filtered sunlight, of sheltered shade, where life abounds and takes on strange shapes, forming shoals that shimmy and shiver together as organic cosmic disco-balls. This is not the place of strangeness but one where strangers come to stay. A realm of in-betweens and not-quites, where a lamp caught in the mirror is reflective of it all.
Magical: Day One 