September 2026 – Listen Here
I am afloat.
Or perhaps that is the wrong word, because floating suggests surrender. Buoyancy. A body borne kindly by water, face turned toward the sun.
This is nothing like that.
My body and soul have become dissociated from one another, separated by some invisible fathom I cannot cross. I am beneath the water, looking upward through the quivering skin of surface tension at a life that continues without me. I can see it. That may be the cruelest part. Sunlight still exists up there. It enters the water in fractured shafts, bending through refraction until everything familiar becomes distorted – recognizable, but never quite where it appears to be.
People move above me as wavering silhouettes.
Their mouths form words I know I should understand. Their voices reach me queerly, robbed of their edges and carried through the water as dull vibrations rather than language. I answer them anyway. I work. I make lists and plans and meals. I remember appointments. I smile when I am meant to smile. My mother trained me well, fitting my mask with her own cruel fingers. The world passes above me in gaiety and laughter while I exist a wraith several fathoms beneath it.
Sometimes I can even see the dancing caustics of sunlight overhead – that beautiful shifting lace cast through the surface – and think, There. There is the way back.
So I swim toward it.
Except swimming is strange here. Every movement is impeded. Arms that ought to carry me upward feel cumbersome, as though the water has thickened around them. I expend twice the effort to travel half the distance, and by the time I reach toward the brightness, I am exhausted by the attempt. Worse, there are moments when I cannot tell whether I am ascending at all. Underwater, without a horizon, direction becomes treacherous. Up resembles sideways. Descent can masquerade as stillness.
Perhaps that is why I can stand in a room full of people and have no idea how far beneath them I have gone.
My lungs are full of water.
I cannot breathe.
Except I do not die.
That is another cruelty of this place. I remain somehow conscious inside the drowning. My chest convulses with the primordial animal demand for air, lungs burning against what they cannot have, while somewhere above the water my body continues its ordinary treachery of living. It walks into work. It answers questions. It pours tea. It laughs when something is funny. No one looking at it would think there is a woman drowning inside there.
But I am.
I am always drowning.
And always above me is that treacherously delicate membrane – the surface tension separating water from air, submersion from breath. It looks so insubstantial from beneath that I cannot understand why I cannot simply put my hand through it.
Sometimes I nearly do.
My arm stretches upward. My shoulder aches with the reach. Light spills between my fingers, distorted and silver, and for one miraculous instant my fingertips pierce the meniscus.
Air touches them.
Not enough to breathe.
Enough to remember.
______________________________________________________
Caius and Lysithea are there, and for a while the three of us play.
There is a flicker of nervousness when I nearly tumble straight off the bed, although in my defense the mattress is absurdly oversized for its frame and seems intent upon ejecting its occupants. I catch myself at the last possible second, clutching at the bedding with considerably less grace than I might have preferred, only to glance across and discover Lysithea suffering nearly the same indignity on the opposite side. I giggle; she joins me, and the ridiculousness of it reaches me even through the water.
I am grateful for that – for not being alone in my uncertainty, for the affection and playfulness in the room, for the peculiar intimacy of three bodies learning how to arrange themselves around one another without choreography or ceremony. An elbow wanders somewhere inconvenient. Someone shifts. A kiss is stolen simply because a mouth happens to be within reach. There is no performance to perfect, only the lovely, slightly untidy business of discovering what fits where and who likes what.
On Lysithea’s command, Caius reclines between us and becomes, for a time, our shared amusement. Lysithea and I trade kisses over him and turn our attentions toward him by turns, passing the worship of his cock between us with the conviviality of sharing wine from the same glass. There is a conspiratorial quality to it that I like: the occasional meeting of our eyes, the awareness of her across his body, his fingers idly toying with tendrils of our hair.
Eventually I turn and settle my legs on either side of his head, my inner thighs muffling his ears as his arms encircle me and draw me down to his mouth. A sigh escapes me as I watch Lysithea, adoring her husband’s rigid length, the waning evening light glancing over his flesh while my own body rises and moves against the rasp of Caius’s beard.
But the water remains.
My body knows these roads. Usually my Inner Goddess races ahead of me upon them, shamelessly responsive and embarrassingly easy to persuade. I have always rather liked that about myself. Tonight, however, the accustomed cadence keeps eluding me. I can feel his practiced mouth and tongue attending to me; I can recognize intellectually that it feels good. Yet recognition and possession have become two different things.
That distinction frightens me.
It is like watching sunlight from beneath the surface. I can see those wavering golden shafts descending toward me. I know what they are. I can even put my hand into one and watch it illuminate my fingers.
But I cannot feel the sun.
I reach for the response I know should be waiting and feel it slide away again, as elusive as trying to close my fist around refracted light.
So we rearrange ourselves, limbs slipping around limbs until I am no longer certain whose hand I felt first or which body moved to accommodate mine.
Lysithea comes to rest beside me, her faithful toy in hand, close enough that I can run my palm across her pristine skin. It astonishes me – fine as spun silk beneath my touch, her breast warm and supple. I become fascinated by the transformations in her as pleasure gathers: the demanding hum of vibration, the subtle tightening beneath that silken surface, the alteration of her breathing, the involuntary cant of her hips.
Then her body draws taut and fractures beside me.
Her moans are sensual and unguarded, every sinew answering her climax, and watching her abandon herself to it is almost enough to make me remember how.
Almost.
Caiusis attends to me as well, his hands searching through that bewildering distance between my mind and my flesh, finding places my thoughts seem to have misplaced. My body answers him in fragments: a contraction low in my belly, the shifting of my thighs, my hips beginning to follow rather than merely receive. The first true current passes through me, faint but unmistakable, disturbing the strange suspended water in which I have been drifting.
I climax, but cannot reach the extravagant release I know my body is capable of, the very reason the waterproof blanket waits beneath us without judgment. Everything in me feels cinched too tightly, as though even surrender requires a permission my mind has temporarily forgotten how to grant.
I sigh, crushingly disappointed in myself.
Not in Caius.
Not in my body, really.
In me.
Because I know the woman who usually lives here. I know how readily she answers when summoned. I know her appetite and abandon, and I cannot understand why I can see her through the water but cannot seem to climb inside her skin.
Then the geometry of us changes again.
Somewhere amid shifting limbs, exchanged glances, and the easy generosity of three people playing together, the evening ceases to belong particularly to Caius. Lysithea orders me to take his place upon the bed. He moves above and straddles me while she settles between my thighs, and suddenly I am surrounded by them – his body commanding my attention from one direction, hers from another, leaving less and less space for me to retreat into that distant underwater place.
Wishing for webbed fingers, I claw for the surface, willing myself toward that wavering membrane overhead. Swim, I command the woman beneath the water. Swim.
Lysithea is sweetness and cunning in equal measure, honeyed warmth intruding upon cold water.
There is a tenderness in the way she attends to me that I had not anticipated, but solicitude should not be mistaken for timidity. Her sable locks spill across my thighs as her hands settle against me with easy assurance, parting me for her mouth. Then her lips close over me and her tongue finds my pearl with such devastating accuracy that my hips lift before I have decided to move them.
Gods, her mouth.
That is what I will remember.
The exquisite softness of her lips parting for that startlingly indecent tongue; the maddening dexterity of it, the way she discovers what makes my breath catch and returns to it without mercy. She tastes and teases, lingers and changes, learning me by response rather than instruction. When I try to retreat from the intensity, her hands hold me open to her attention, and she follows, coaxing another helpless movement from my hips, another strangled sound from my throat.
There is generosity in it, but there is command as well. She seems less interested in simply making me climax than in finding the woman who has been missing all evening and dragging her bodily toward the surface.
And, gods of Olympus, her mouth finds the woman I have been searching for all evening.
My fingers knot themselves into the bedding. My thighs begin answering her mouth without consulting me. The careful observer inside my head – the woman who has spent the evening noting that this feels good, that this should be working – finally begins losing her ability to narrate what is happening. Lysithea’s tongue makes thought increasingly untenable. Each time I begin slipping away from myself, her mouth calls me back into my flesh.
The distance between mind and body contracts by increments, fathom by fathom. The pressure eases as I ascend; the room draws nearer, their breathing becomes distinct again, and the water above me grows luminous until I can almost believe I am going to reach it.
Then Lysithea changes the movement of her tongue and whatever tenuous authority I still possess gives way.
My body bucks beneath her mouth, my hands clutch uselessly at the bedding, my body still pinned beneath Caius, and the first climax tears through me with enough force to obliterate the watery distance I have been fighting all evening. Before I can properly recover, her lips and tongue are coaxing me upward again, and another follows so closely that I lose the border between where one ends and the next begins.
For the first time all evening, I am not thinking about what is being done to me. I am inside the experience rather than observing it, inside my own flesh rather than watching it from some unreachable depth.
The body that has seemed so remote becomes intimately, gloriously mine again. I can feel the sheets twisted in my fists, Caius above me, Lysithea between my thighs, her mouth still working its particular alchemy upon me, and the warmth and movement of all three of us tangled together.
What she gives me in those minutes is far greater than an orgasm.
She gives me back my body.
Then the surface tension finally gives.
I break through.
Air enters my lungs with the almost painful expansion of someone who has been submerged too long, and for one incandescent interval there is no veil, no refraction, no watery distance between the woman experiencing this body and the woman living inside it. They occupy the same skin again, and perhaps that should be an ordinary thing, but tonight it feels extraordinary simply to belong to myself.
For those few minutes, I remember what it is to breathe without having to fight for air.
Perhaps that is why I notice the loss so acutely when bedtime comes.
As the stars emerge, I feel the first almost imperceptible tug of the undertow. There is no violent plunge, no monstrous hand closing around my ankle – not yet. I simply become aware that their voices sound farther away. The surface that had been against my mouth is suddenly above my eyes, then beyond my fingertips, receding by degrees while I am still trying to understand when I began descending.
Light changes first, and warmth goes with it.
The bright terrestrial colors belonging to people who breathe air are gradually filtered away as the water deepens, one wavelength surrendered after another. Reds vanish first, then the warmer hues follow, until everything belonging to life above becomes altered by depth. The room I occupied only minutes before now exists somewhere overhead in wavering remnants, distorted by refraction into a place I recognize without quite believing I was ever there.
Eventually there is only blue.
Endless, bruised blue, darkening by degrees.
I keep looking upward, although I am alone now. The house has surrendered itself to sleep around me, doors closing, voices disappearing one by one until there is no one left above the water to hear me. Even the possibility I had privately nursed might keep me in the moonlight has yielded to exhaustion. I am curled upon the couch with only the darkened room and the dreadful return of my own thoughts, descending beneath the reach of ordinary human sound, past the depth where I imagine even whale song might still croon its haunting lullaby.
The pressure changes as I descend. I feel it in my chest, behind my eyes, in that inexplicable internal compression of being taken farther beneath the surface than the body was ever meant to go. Above me is the moonlight I had wanted to remain within; below me, a tenebrous immensity I cannot see.
I cannot decide which frightens me more.
My heart races, my eyes wet with ridiculous tears I have no reason to shed, and still I continue looking upward as the distance increases, watching those final silver traces diminish through fathoms of blackening water until the stars are no longer stars at all, but minute silver wounds in a ceiling I cannot reach.
By morning I am well below the surface, my lungs still making their futile demand for air.
Currents buffet me from every direction until I cannot distinguish up from down, though somewhere amid the bewilderment comes the horrible suspicion that I am creating the currents myself. I race back and forth trying to make everything perfect: everyone comfortable, everything arranged, every responsibility anticipated before anyone can think to ask it of me.
I am swimming furiously inside an ocean of my own making, lungs burning for air that never comes, and wondering why I am exhausted. My tears mingle unnoticed with the salt of the ocean; even grief becomes indistinguishable from the water already surrounding me.
Perhaps if I move quickly enough, accomplish enough, remember enough, I can generate the momentum required to rise. I can break through, dance among the sunbeams with those dearest to me, and enjoy the day I have worked so hard to arrange. Instead, every completed task seems merely to displace more water. I remain submerged, only now I am tired as well.
Then a firm hand grasps mine, swallowing it in its might.
I am led upstairs, where morning pours through the windows, pale and clean, illuminating the room with that peculiar intimacy daylight gives to things usually reserved for darkness. For fifteen minutes, possibly a little more, the responsibilities are taken from me by force – not discussed or negotiated with, simply displaced.
That may be part of what reaches me.
I am fiercely kissed and manhandled with such consuming attention that thought becomes difficult. Sprawled across the bed, I surrender to his body, his fingers buried deep inside and working me, until my body finally remembers how to answer. My fingers stretch helplessly into the sheets as the response comes abruptly, embarrassingly – an extravagant gush spilling over his hand and along his forearm before soaking into the towel beneath my hips. There is no mistaking it now. Whatever distance remains inside my mind, my body has come roaring back to life.
There is scarcely time to recover before the familiar fullness of his cock tears a whimper from me.
This.
This is what I had been searching for.
Not merely the act itself, and not even climax. Occupation. For those minutes there is no room inside my mind for the thousand obligations clawing at one another because my body has become too immediate to ignore. There is no space left for anticipation, calculation, accommodation. Someone else has taken possession of the moment and demands that my body answer.
The water falls away.
I breach the surface so violently I might have wings. Air fills me; language returns with it, and I ask to ride him.
He listens, lying back as I climb over him with none of the elegance I might have preferred to remember afterward. There is a wantonness in me that should perhaps embarrass me – and does – but embarrassment seems an absurdly terrestrial concern when I have only just rediscovered air.
I do not care enough to stop. I cannot, because I know now what waits beneath me.
I do not want to go back under the water. I do not want to drown, so I ride him as though my life depends upon remaining above it. Perhaps, in that moment, some submerged part of me believes it does.
His hands anchor my hips, keeping me balanced while I take what I came for. I scratch at him, clutch him, fight for every inch of altitude my body can give me, chasing that rare place where thought finally disappears beneath flesh. He lets me take my fill without asking me to temper it or explain it.
For those precious minutes I am merely a woman astride a man, shamelessly alive.
I surface.
I breathe.
And I believe – because experience has taught me to believe – that this will be enough.
That matters.
This has always been my strange and reliable alchemy: exhaust the body, silence the mind, and emerge afterward restored to myself. The surcease usually lasts for days. Long enough to laugh with my friends, float beneath the sun, let someone else tell a story without half my mind cataloguing what remains undone. Long enough to inhabit the life I have so carefully arranged instead of merely administering it.
That is what I expect when I descend the stairs after my shower.
I expect to still be breathing.
Instead, the water is waiting.
At first I do not recognize the Kraken. I think that matters. It never announces itself with some great leviathan violence from the abyss. I discover it has found me only when I seek to join the others and realize that, despite everything that happened upstairs, I am descending again.
There is merely a brush against my ankle at first – cold and gelatinous, slick as entrails, sliding over my skin with a horrible, almost tender curiosity as I struggle to set up our group activity. Then it circles back. This time it lingers. A pallid tendril winds around my calf, its underside clammy with suckers that fasten one by one, each attachment so slight that I scarcely notice the accumulating drag.
Another finds my waist; another slips around my wrist.
They do not seize me. That would almost be kinder. They adhere. They accumulate. They make themselves part of me until I can no longer distinguish their weight from my own.
Work. Money. The house, the children, the plans, the thousand tiny promises I make before anyone has even thought to ask them of me. The Kraken does not create these things; they belong to my life above the water. It merely finds each one and winds a cold limb around it until every ordinary responsibility acquires the weight of the abyss.
The harder I swim, the more determined I become to enjoy my day. I have friends waiting for me. There is sunlight overhead, a river to float, people I love gathered inside a weekend I planned because I wanted to be here. I should be able to reach them.
So I swim harder.
And the more desperately I try to join them in the light, the more those slick appendages tighten, sliding obscenely over my skin before finding better purchase. I kick and feel one unfasten, only for another to curl around my thigh. I claw at the one cinched across my ribs, the last of my bubbles escaping toward the surface, and discover its flesh is too slimy to grasp. There is nothing to hold, nothing I can tear away – only that revolting mucous glide beneath my fingers and the ineluctable downward pull originating somewhere in the black water below.
And still I do not blame the creature.
I blame the swimmer.
By the time I understand that I am being dragged into deeper water, I have already made the cruelest mistake of all: I think the weight belongs to me. I think if I can make everyone else happy, I can be happy too. If I can make the day lovely enough, arrange it well enough, give enough of myself to it, surely I can stay and play in the light with everyone else.
The cold, glistening thing fastened to my body does not care.
My chest aches under the strain. I look upward at the diminishing surface and despise myself for not swimming harder.
That anger is almost worse than the drowning, because this should have worked.
It always worked before.
Usually riding until my thighs ache and exploding until thought becomes incoherent is enough to grant my mind a truce that lasts for days on end. Especially after reaching such heights – some Olympian pinned beneath my lithe, splintering body while I take from him exactly what I want.
She does not merely feel familiar.
She is me.
Or she was.
So why can I touch her for fifteen minutes and then lose her again? Why can I breach the surface, fill my lungs – and still find the Kraken waiting beneath my feet?
Perhaps that is what frightens me most. Not that the ascent fails, but that it succeeds. I do reach the surface. I breathe. I recognize myself. For fifteen minutes there is no question that I am still in here.
It simply does not reset me.
I had expected to come downstairs restored – to step into the sunlight, gather my friends, go to the river, and finally live inside the weekend I had worked so hard to create. Instead, I find myself performing the motions of my own life while sinking beneath them.
And then I sink anyway.
Am I broken?
The next morning I am teased mercilessly, flirted with, tempted.
For a while I fight my way toward the morning sun because I remember what happened yesterday. I remember air. I remember those glorious minutes when my mind finally belonged to my body again.
Perhaps I can get there.
Perhaps yesterday simply wasn’t enough. Perhaps if I try harder.
There is still a stubborn part of me convinced this is a problem I can solve. I simply need to get over myself. Fake it until I make it. I adjust the mask a little tighter as I sit across the breakfast table, fingers circling my mug of hot tea, silently petitioning the caffeine to perform some minor resurrection upon my system.
Look at me. I am here. I am participating.
Surely participation will eventually become presence.
Eventually I find myself bent over an enormous bed, toes planted against the thin rug, my cheek resting upon the plump mattress while oiled fingers tease between my thighs.
My body responds.
Of course it does. It is not dead.
I feel the glistening evidence of my arousal against my inner thighs and hear the masculine murmur of appreciation behind me.
That almost makes it worse.
I am encouraged farther onto the bed, shoulders lowered, hips raised, exposed to the morning and to the hands arranging me. When I am entered deeply enough to wrench a moan from somewhere beneath my ribs, my fingers tighten in the bedding and my hips answer of their own accord.
It feels good. It feels very good.
I shutter my eyes, willing my wings to unfurl, willing my soul to rise with them as the rhythm builds and the percussion of bodies carries through the house. I search for that familiar moment when flesh becomes louder than thought, when the mind finally relinquishes its dominion, and I can simply be.
And still –
I am underwater.
My lungs burn.
That is the horror of it.
My body is participating while some essential part of me watches from beneath that shimmering veil. I can feel the mattress against my cheek, hands upon me, the brutal rhythmic collision of another body, the physical response gathering faithfully inside mine. Every piece of evidence says I am here.
And yet I am not.
I cannot quite reach myself.
I do not know whether I require more time, more intensity, more tenderness, more abandon – or whether I should stop trying to excavate myself through other people’s bodies altogether. I do not know, and the uncertainty unsettles me more than I want to admit because sexuality has always been one of the places where I could find myself without searching.
My body has always been the lifeline lowered through the water.
I could seize it with both hands and follow it home.
Now I pull upon that line, and sometimes there is no answering weight at the other end. It disappears into miles and miles of dark water, and I am left holding it without knowing whether it still leads anywhere.
Somewhere far above me is the woman I remember being. I can see her silhouette through the surface. I know she is mine. Sometimes my fingertips even touch hers before the current catches me again and carries me backward.
I sink.
I can still see the surface from here. That is what unnerves me. Sunlight moves across it in familiar wavering ribbons, the distorted shapes of people living above it just visible through the refraction.
I remember being there.
I simply cannot seem to swim back.
And for the first time, a thought enters me that concerns me more than the void around me:
What if swimming harder is not the answer?
I have spent days doing precisely that. I have fought the currents, chased sunlight, exhausted my body trying to silence my screaming mind. I have breached the surface again and again, convincing myself that because I could still reach it, I could save myself.
And every time, the ocean took me back.
Perhaps I have misapprehended what is happening to me.
Perhaps the wind and sky are not waiting because I have failed to swim hard enough. Perhaps I am here because I am weak, ungrateful, insufficiently disciplined, insufficiently appreciative of this life I have worked so hard to build. Perhaps the cold thing wound around my ribs is punishment for some deficiency in me.
Or perhaps it is more.
Sinister thoughts begin moving through the darkness like predatory eels, sinuous and silver-bellied, appearing at the periphery before vanishing again into black water. I cannot always tell whether the thoughts belong to me or merely know how to imitate my voice.
And I am tired.
Gods, I am tired.
So I stop kicking. Not as some grand act of surrender; I simply do not have the energy to waste upon another pathetic movement. I suspend myself there, conserving whatever remains.
It feels as though I have already descended into the Mariana Trench and lingered there far too long. Some bleak part of me wonders whether I am simply meant to remain in these depths, eventually growing gills and forgetting that lungs were ever intended for air.
But… but… I remember the moon.
I remember nights beneath her cool caress when I was not watching life through the water but standing squarely inside it – surrounded by voices and music and people I loved, belonging without having to remind myself how. I remember sunlight warming my cheeks and wanting to turn my face toward it rather than watching it fracture above me. I remember Lysithea calling me back into my flesh. I remember an Olympian beneath me and the almost violent unfurling of my wings as I soared into the stratosphere.
Those moments were real.
I was real.
I do not want to descend until the last silver trace of the surface disappears and I can no longer remember which direction I was supposed to swim. I do not want to forget the woman with sapphire hair and the wicked mouth. I do not want my Inner Goddess to become some half-remembered creature from another life, a mythology I once wrote about myself and can no longer prove existed.
I want her back.
I want me back.
Instead, I am sitting alone in the darkness of my living room after what should have been a magnificent weekend, and there is finally a truth I cannot ornament my way around:
I am… I am not okay.
The admission frightens me more than I expected because I am the swimmer, the lifeboat. I am the woman who carries, arranges, anticipates, fixes. When water enters the boat, I do not merely find the bucket; I repair the hole. When someone beside me begins sinking, I reach for them, propping them upon pieces of my own vessel if necessary, trusting that I will work out later how to remain afloat with whatever is left of mine.
I have spent so much of my life believing endurance is simply what one does until the crisis passes. That giving until I am spent is the highest form of love. That if I can keep everyone around me happy and cared for, if I can make myself useful enough, perhaps I will be worthy of love, of being chosen. That I will, finally, be enough.
Some ancient, tremulous part of me still believes the corollary: if they do leave, it was my fault and I failed.
That if I were easier to love, better at carrying, more useful, less difficult, less tired, less me, I might finally become the sort of woman no one abandons.
So I repeat the old liturgy.
Carry.
Endure.
Protect.
Survive.
I carried. I endured. I protected. I survived.
And I waited.
They said time would help. That eventually I would feel better. That my spark would return. I believed them because waiting seemed like another form of endurance, and endurance is a language I speak fluently.
But this time, it is not passing.
I am scared.
There is love above me. Friendship. Community. Hands that would reach into this water if I told them how far I have sunk. I know that. I can still see their shapes moving beyond the surface.
But shame is another current.
I shrink from exposing the true depth of this weakness, afraid that after months of encouragement and reassurance, they will finally tire of diving after me. How many times can people descend into someone else’s darkness before they begin protecting their own air?
One of the eels passes close enough for me to see its eyes.
They should stop trying.
Another circles lazily beneath me.
Look at everything they have already given you.
A third slips past my ear.
You cannot even save yourself.
That one sounds so much like my own voice that I believe it.
Still, beneath all that shame, another truth remains: I do not think I can swim out of this alone.
I have exhausted every resource I know how to reach from down here. Time. Therapy. Community. Raging. Weeping. Adventures and trips. Solitude when I thought I required solitude; people when I thought I required people. Sunlight. Rivers. Sex. Exhaustion. Rest. I have tried filling my calendar and emptying it. I have tried surrendering to grief and refusing to indulge it.
I have tried getting over myself.
And I am still here. Drowning.
Perhaps there is some chemistry inside my brain that has gone awry, and medicine might become a life raft. The thought should comfort me.
It doesn’t.
Because another possibility rises immediately beside it, sleek and cold.
Perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with me.
The eel returns, gliding through the blackness with obscene grace, its small teeth appearing and disappearing as its mouth opens and closes, offering the cruelest evidence it possesses:
You are the common denominator.
In every loss.
Every failed relationship.
Every friendship that waned or disappeared.
Every place where I gave until I resented giving and then despised myself for the resentment.
Every moment when the life I worked so hard to create should have been enough and inexplicably wasn’t.
Me.
The common denominator is me.
I sit on my couch in the darkness and cannot make myself argue with it.
Perhaps tomorrow I will.
Perhaps tomorrow I will make the appointment. Perhaps I will tell someone that time and determination and all my familiar remedies have failed me. Perhaps medicine will be a raft, or a rope, or merely enough buoyancy to let my mouth reach the air.
But tonight there is no revelation.
No hand breaks the surface.
No wings unfurl.
There is only the darkened living room, the magnificent weekend already behind me, and the terrible shame of having been given so much to enjoy and still coming home empty.
Somewhere impossibly far overhead, the moon continues shining without me.
I close my eyes.
And drift.
Until next time, XO. Elsie
