In the Land of O₂

We sleep in darkness even when the light is full. We live in a bubble of light inside the greatest darkness.

The moon rises over the left shoulder even as the earth rises over the right. Yet the moon next might lower over your right. Sunrise is always simultaneously sunset.

Head east far enough and you will reach the west.

Only gravity gives us perspective. Without our feet held to the ground, there is no up—only around.

Gravity is our tether.

When the tether gives, she rolls and tumbles—her voice possible only because she is living in a bubble of oxygen, a bubble of light. She tumbles towards the great blue light, sometimes up, sometimes down, only her feet tell her which.

We live in a bubble of oxygen so small we can breathe it all up. And we breathe it in. We take it down into us. The heart beats to the quantity of oxygen we have left.

If tethered to a person, we feel its tenuousness, its temporariness. The tether can break. He can release her from it and fall down back to the earth, or up, through its clouds and into its single ocean, leaving an ocean of blackness for an ocean of water (hydrogen doubled and paired with oxygen).

If she can make it back into a bubble of oxygen, she might live a while, looking up into the oceans for hope. She might believe the darkness is her hope. She might seek solace in its great black mystery. She might hope to know it is something else.

But it is an empty blackness she passes through just as we pass through our dreams. We do not live in these dreams of ours, even as they haunt us. We live through them and wake to light, or we dream through them to a timeless dark.

Enough black, and we dream some light into it: A face at a porthole. A great happiness of a person filling a pod. A story too amazing to tell. Sometimes, we dream our way out.

Even as she falls, she hears the music and crackling, the singing and the scratching of a voice, something sublime in the old sense, like the smell of grass cut in her pride. She hears the distant echoing voices of the earth coming back up to her. And her voice drifts down, in pitterings, through these voices cutting up through her and moving, forever, on past her.

The music tells us who we feel we are, but eyes are wells of darkness, for we can see only from within our own dark reaches. Yet our hearts beat against the music as the waves beat against the beach, and we erode finally into our selves.

A drop of water will hit the lens of the single eye watching her and splatter, but her tear will drift through that lens and out deep into the darkness that separates us. It will rest so close before those of us watching her from within our theatrical darkness that we will believe we can can reach out our hands and catch it, hold it, letting the liquid seep into our bodies.

The tear in the darkness will grow larger as it nears us, because nothing is ever only one size, because everything differs in size depending on how close it is to us. The tear in the darkness eventually becomes another lens, and we can see her, murkily, through her own salty ocean of a tear.

Every tear is an ocean to the one who drops it.

We can taste it is so.

If she falls, she falls through air, she falls towards earth, and the friction of air, the friction of a lighted something in place of a dark nothing, makes a great fire, a greater heat.

As she falls through fire, she falls to earth, she falls towards water, she falls into water. Now, made suddenly heavy again by the pull of gravity, she swims in a wet darkness. This time, she swims up towards the earth, towards the light, towards the place where saltless water laps upon the sand.

And she is surrounded by a great light surrounded by a greater darkness, but her heart beats steady and it beats slow. She is held in place by the gravity of the place.

Then we return to dreaming.

As we are directed to do. 

ecr. l'inf.