2 - Breathe

Now I want you to imagine that you are standing on a beach. You have been to a beach before, haven't you? Good. You're there. You're standing on that beach, and its morning, so the sun has just risen. It's just coming over the horizon, but it's warm, you can feel it blazing onto your skin. The sand beneath your toes is warm, too. You can feel it beneath your toes, finely grained, golden sand, shifting underneath your feet. Have you felt that before, warm sand on the soles of your feet? It's nice, isn't it? Good. Feel it for a moment.

Think about the sand, think of it moving beneath you. Every grain of that was a stone one day, you know, and before that every stone was a rock, and every rock came from a mountain. They've all been ground down by the relentless pounding of the ocean, over thousands of years. Each of the thousands upon countless thousands of tiny fragments beneath you came from a mountain. We tend to think of sand as rather insignificant. 'Like sands through the hourglass', we say. But sand is older than you by far, and when you are gone to earth and dust, the sand you stand on will still be there, for many more thousands of years. Think about that awhile.

Think about the motion of sand, how it blows with the wind. How each crash of water on the beach lifts up and circulates great handfuls of it, mighty King Triton handfuls, and moves them around. Does the sand travel? Does the ocean take it far and wide, and move it about the Earth. How many beaches has the sand under your feet visited? All of them? All of them a thousand times? It has had the time to do what you would never be able to, over and over. There are beaches, out there somewhere, which no human foot has ever trod on, yet the sand under your feet right now may have been there. No eyes to see, no mind to perceive. Is it human arrogance that makes those things so important? For all the sand knows, it may never have moved at all. And perhaps it has never left this beach. Perhaps it simply shifts a little to the left, a little to the right, a little out to sea, a little back again. The same repeated pattern, over and over into eternity. Perhaps this one beach is all it has ever known, ever been. Perhaps there is no way to know.

Every morning the sand has rearranged itself, the footsteps you left in the night are replaced by the same undulating ripples that now mold themselves once more to your feet. Maybe the sand below that has rearranged itself as well. And the sand below that. And the earth below that. All reforming itself, all reshaping. The ocean makes the same waves, over and over, but it's always different water. Do you think the sand is different? Or perhaps it is just doing the same thing at a geological pace, great waves of sand, slowly shifting about you. Do you think if you were to stand there, perfectly still, for the rest of your days, you would see the shape of the sand, see the way it recreated itself every night, feel the pattern of movement about you? Do you think it would slowly envelop you, that you would sink, day by day, into the slowly whirling mass of particulate, quicksand in slow motion? Does the sand seem still to you now, beneath your feet, or does it seem filled with potential energy? We cling to the skin of this planet, you and I and all. We are but part of the thin film of debris that coats the outermost layer of something so gargantuan it encompasses everything you have ever experienced and ever will experience. Below the sand, below the earth, below the rock, there is heat and motion and timelessness. The sand came from this. They are connected. We came from dust, and we will be dust again. We are connected. Try to feel the sand beneath your feet. Try to feel the earth, moving below you, hurtling through space. Take a deep breath. In. And out.

Good.

Think on it, and you'll be there. The wind breathes. A wave of air lifts a tiny film of sand from the surface of the beach and sends it flying across you. You feel each and every particle of sand as it strikes your skin softly. You feel the force that is driving it, sliding over and around and through you, water around a stone. Striking the fine hairs on your arm. Striking the skin of your legs. You feel your skin tightening into goose bumps. Not trying to stay warm, just trying to soak up the sensation of the wind, and the sand, and the early morning sunlight. You have been told that goose bumps are a vestigial response, that they do not make you warmer, but you enjoy the heightened feelings it brings to you.

You are naked. Your clothes are behind you, in the dunes, where you have left them. You won't be needing them again. You feel no shame, you feel perfectly comfortable and normal, as though you were meant to be this way. Which, you suppose for a moment, is true. The gust of wind has passed by, carrying its sandy cargo to wherever it needs to go, and all is calm again. You take a step forward. You feel your muscles contracting and expanding under your skin. It feels sensual. You remember your skin is an organ, the largest organ, an incredibly sophisticated organ that covers you, holds you. Stretches and contracts. Feels everything around you. It is your defining edge, where you stop and the world begins. You are so small, yet you hold the world inside you when you perceive it this way, allow yourself to be open to it. Let it in. Your foot has completed its arc, left the hole it created in the sand, made a smooth, graceful pendulum forward, and has again touched down on the virgin sand, compressing it, shifting it, moving it under you. It squeezes between your toes and instead of feeling the individual grains you feel what they create when they are joined, the liquidity of iota, shifting and molding themselves to you. You see the foot-shaped impression you have made in the sand behind you, a mark on the world that is truly yours, down to the finely grained patterns in your skin, as unique to you as your fingerprint, as distinct as your own thoughts. You wonder how long that mark will last, how long that shape will hold. If anyone will pass by and see that shape, and know that you were here, that you changed the world in this one tiny, delible way. Even as you watch, you see tiny grains of sand start to spill into the gulf, slowly erasing this record of your presence. By tomorrow it will be gone, as will you, and the sand will not remember you.

You take another step, trying to predict how many more steps it will take before you are in the ocean. You think it is maybe ten or twelve paces away. You feel afraid, but you don't know what of. Are you being brave, or are you running away, or does it take courage to take flight? You are not sure. You take another step. The ocean has withdrawn from you, it is now fifteen paces away, and still falling back, the water hissing as it retreats backwards over the sand, little bubbles of air that were trapped in the sand pop as the pressure of the water above them is removed. The water falls back and back, the hiss retreating into silence, sucked away under a wall that builds with the gathering water, lifting up and curling into a foamy chaotic mass that crests as the noise swells to a roar, and then rushes up the beach before you with a crash, eating up the distance between you. Like your footprint, every wave is the same, but amongst all that chaos each pattern cannot possibly repeat itself, even after a millennium of waves crashing on a hundred thousand beaches, each is a little different to the other, and each, once it has returned to the ocean, cannot ever be repeated precisely.

The wave rushes up the beach and up over your toes, deliciously cold against the warm sand. You suppress your instinct to leap back from the waterline, to run back up the beach. You remember playing on the beach as a child, running up to the water's edge and running backward and forward with the waves, trying not to get your feet wet. Laughing. Lost times. You scold yourself for being nostalgic, and try not to let your memories run away with you. The water is running over your toes, fountaining up your feet and tunneling into the sand around your heel. Its energy exhausted, its futile quest for the moon gone awry, the water submits to gravity and turns, rolling back over your feet, carving ever-deeper caverns around you, and you feel yourself sinking, very slightly, into the sediment as the sand recedes with the wave.

You follow the receding ocean, and again it comes, and now you are before it, and it washes over you, over your ankles, over your knees. You realize you've never been aware of that line between wet and dry that comes when you enter the ocean. The heat of your skin fights the cold of the water and that is the front line, and it's numb, but the numbness has a presence that feels, if anything, more real than the neutrality of your body heat. You keep walking forward, plunging into the ocean proper, now swirling around your upper thighs. A wave comes, pushes you back, and you involuntarily leap a little in the air as it splashes your groin. Even now, your body wishes to protect you, wishes you to be a fruitful thing, to stop thinking, to recreate, to go on. Survive. You push on through the water, and it parts ahead of you, making way.

*

You're out past the breakers now and the sea no longer fights you now. You feel it drawing you forward, welcoming you. The drop becomes the ocean. You step forward and forward again. Memories return, of playing in the ocean, of swimming, snorkeling, of leaping and sliding. Again you fight these away, all the while thinking that if you have to fight so hard, is that not a sign? Should you not turn about, sit on the beach, reconsider? Like the memories, you shake these thoughts away, and plunge forward.

In a few steps the sandy bottom you have been walking on drops away to who knows what depths, you bounce on your toes for one step, two steps, and then it is gone, and you are set adrift, your legs windmilling, your arms starting to walk for you, dragging you through the breathing liquid as it rises and falls in great, slow swells. In. and Out. You push forward, one stroke after another. Your legs are behind you now and you have flattened out, floating in the water as you take a left stroke, a right stroke. A left, a right. You wonder how long you can go for, how far you can get from the shore before you can go no further. Left. Right. You are a tiny spot of warmth in an endless outer space of cold. You are alive. You are an intruder in a much larger organism.

Left. Right. In. Out.

Good.

You swim for some time. You feel your arms start to tire. How many more strokes do they have in them, you wonder briefly. You wonder if you have passed the point at which you do not have enough strokes to return. You wonder if you should just float and let the current take you where it may. You press on. Left stroke, right stroke, you press on. Like the sand on the beach, you sense the ocean below you, vast and black and empty but also full. Full of life, full of dangerous things, full of things unknown, that no-one has seen and you my friend have certainly never seen, and probably could not imagine. "It's a small world" you may have heard, but the world is not small: you are. The ocean becomes the drop. There are things down there that could never see you, have never seen, have no need to see. Great leviathans, moving in the dark. They know nothing of you and your troubles, such as they are. Such as you know nothing of them, other than your dark, primordial imaginings.

The water is lapping at your face now and you realize you have started to tire, that your strokes have become less powerful, less frequent, and are not holding your head as high in the water as they first did. You are aware that you have lost track of time, or at least think you have, which is, you suppose, more or less the same thing. You spin about to try to see how far from the shore you have come. At first you see nothing but water, but then a swell lifts you up and you see the land, but not the beach- the waves obscure that. You can't judge the distance very well, but it seems far. You don't feel like you could make it back, but then you wonder if you have some sort of hidden reserves within you that you have never needed to call on before, that would spring into action, should you need them. How sad, you reflect in a distant sort of way, that you've never had cause to find out what you are made of before, and never will. You wonder if you should try and swim further out, or even attempt to swim back, but instead, like so much of your life, you are caught between both alternatives, and you do neither. You simply float amongst the passing waves, great power that flows through you, around you, under you, but does not seem able to move you. Your arms paddle weakly, absently.

Your head slips under the water, and you panic. What you want is irrelevant, your body is a machine designed to stay alive, and it overrides you. Your arms start grasping forward, as if trying to climb a non-existent ladder out of the sea. Your head drops under the water again, and in a flurry of motion you bring yourself up out of the water and gasp for breath, but the second under the water holding your breath has disrupted your rhythm, and now combined with your racing heart you are panting, your head pointed to the sky as the water laps around your ears. You see clouds.

You go under again, your flailing arms unable to keep you above the waterline. You take a deep breath as you submerge, and hold it as you float down. Light above, darkness below. The coldness of the ocean has given way to numbness. You float, and your arms become still. Then you breathe in water, and you simultaneously breathe in pain. Agony racks your body as the water enters your lungs, tearing up your chest from the inside. Your throat spasms shut to stop the inrush of water, and your body twists and contorts, suspended in the water. Direction becomes meaningless, all ways are up, and all ways are down. You can't think, your brain has reverted to an animal state, survival mode, it just wants to survive, but you have put yourself into a position where that is not an option. The machine has overridden its programming.

As less and less oxygen reaches the brain, a sudden calmness overcomes you, and you stop spasming. You drift quietly in the stillness once again. The morning sunlight refracts through the water in great diagonal columns, the vast pillars of heaven's gates, and you are drifting through them. All is tranquil, including your mind, which is slowly drifting away. All is fading. Nothing in, nothing out.

Good.

*

A mighty hand punches your chest and you are flung back into the world. There is noise and light and pain. You turn instinctively and vomit as great gasps of pink, brackish water comes flooding from you. You cough uncontrollably, shiver violently, utterly disoriented. You must have lost consciousness under the water and now you have returned. You are lying on the wooden deck of a small boat, and the man who punched your chest kneels beside you, looking at your naked form with frank disbelief. He is clothed, but soaked to the skin. Sunlight creates tiny lines on the creases of his face. You see each hair of his beard in awful clarity. You see his lips moving, and your hear words from far away, but you are far too confused to understand them. They are noises, unconnected to anything you once knew, much as the information your eyes is giving you seems unreal, impossible to interpret.

You curl your head toward your belly and it runs into his knee, wet khakis on wood. Old wood, with layers of curled paint, white then faded red then the deep natural brown of the underlying matter. You smell the wet fabric, then start weeping.

"Please," you hear yourself whisper between painful coughs, "please throw me back in.

"Please let me die."