Struggling as my weight meets the jagged edge of the pool, I am finally amongst my breath. The moon glows scattered across the surface of the waves as they move in flux, at large with the ocean.

This time, a single moment evades capture, and one by one, the cells of all living things burn off, contort and collect into dust. Trying to mimic their missing pieces. Our decay snakes through history slow and amusing like lapping waves, like lava.

I choose to rest here.

I ask if they have seen her.

Spread across the water, they spiral and shift in front of me. Their cyrillic movements discussions of colour.

They twist upwards, snake out, shifting from one body to another, suspended from nothing, clasped between themselves and the ether. A sharp presence lit up in the blank declination of colour to the sea. They listen. Move themselves, attached with the dolorous pace with which they address me. Nobody is here. We aren’t going. Something is spoken, it is caustic. This upsets me.

I take up, off, past the blue cloth that spreads its adoration under ivory. With the last of my burnt breath I reach the mouth of the cave and then the sky and then the surface. I rest my bones beneath the dry, paper birds that soared above. The drunkest of blues tickled by the cloud dispersing. The dogmatic lick of salty wounds. Pruning and stretching my face. Confused, but not sorry, the thought almost widens, as I dare keep look, and then, I am slapped away.

We were unable to communicate. Things I couldn’t recognise took shape of things id never seen before, men spoken a tongue regardless of history. Carrying my weight, sometimes not so, the brutal white foam, longed for a treatise to be inked on silk- a life bore across the world. The silence of the sun would dissipate, and things once considered unfortunate would be kin to us.

As the new world raged on, it softened its claws on the edges of our psyches. Retreating for perspective as our language declined. Back-evil. Cloaked in a device for self deception, we arrive at our illusory way of living. As cyclical as our days, our weeks, our months, our spite and hunger keep coming, in self sufficience, in defiance of the host.

In the dark, the host dreams of great deception. Her dreams are sick and pulse with fear. The mirror restless, the mother, his pisces. I don’t know why or how, who or what or where.

Each version of her mocks her. Each becomes a single movement of light. An empire which countless fail. I am successful. They swim directionless, they do not talk, they worry for their safety as a group. They do not fight. It all comes down again.

The salt strips and lungs pool, I am expelled from the sea, to the solace of rock, via current. It comes from below. The light cuts in its meanings. From up here we have to remind ourselves of its state, the non permissible. The colours of misleading tone, from a colour violence reduced to its palest, bluest form. How could the sun know? I was pulled out- flung in foil blanket. To rest now.

The eye of the fish lay miles over.

Staring upwards, glinting forward. I never know when I will next be here. I try to compress the misery. I try to spend a long time looking. I look until my eyes burn, obscured by the demand of the sun, and overcome with tears, I lay,

ere I found her, if I ever found her.