recorded
you find yourself below the surface. it has been so for some time. there was a stair, or a slope, or only an unnoticed thinning of the air. above you is a window of light, the shape of a window in your old bedroom.
you are not struggling. your lungs accept that there is no more breath in the way the body accepts a long winter. there is a quiet here that the day has never managed. someone in a great while passes overhead — the shadow of a swimmer, or of a heron, or of a thought. you watch them go. you do not call after them.
you understand that drowning, when it is slow, becomes a kind of silence. the water has the warmth of a hand laid on the back. the floor of the dream is sand, then tile, then sand. somewhere a long way up, wake is happening to someone else. you stay. there is no urgency. the sea has, after all, always been waiting.
recorded on waking · undated