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Interiority

Do you feel it? 

Last night I went to bed worried about what you think of me. Worried about whether you would be able to understand my creations, think bad of me, call me names, shun me. Worried that I am not good enough for you. 

Headless and floating at the bottom of this ocean in the darkness I dreamed of a new current, a different stream of consciousness, a new body of aqua blue water for feeling. The new, mixes with the dark ivy bands of the old, pushing through my pores of my past life. The water swirls around my head and through my taking in and exhausting I produce a new color, that of swirling magenta. My aquatic respiration completes me. I am one with this new watery body, larger than my small bones and peeling skin; I am finally death within the sea. 

I awoke this morning hearing the faint words floating in and through me. No longer will I comfort you at the sake of me. How can one be co-dependent with the world? So many of us are. We hide at the bottom of these oceans hoping to get by, grabbing the scrapes of food that fall from the mouths of those above us. We stay silent and hidden between rocks and kelp never realizing that an ear or a nose can be seen pointing out the side of our darkness. We want to blend in rather than stand out. I have not come here to blend in. No body has come here to blend in. Nature only blends when it needs to protect itself, otherwise it is all show, all uniqueness. 

I am not like others. My childhood is unlike anyone else I know. I have spent my whole life trying to be one in a school of fish, yet my scales are black against the shiny silvery scales of all others. They have always known I was different as I overhear their whispering, she is eccentric, doesn’t belong here, is scary, doesn’t belong with us, is shocking, doesn’t belong anywhere near us, is blunt, is cruel, is dangerous.” Black against silver stands out, calling attention to predators, and removal is seen as a safety precaution for the whole. Nature protects herself. 

The faint sounds come from a bodiless head, a wobbly wide mouth, moving out individual letters and incomprehensible words. I listened from the in-between watery vapor of sleep and wake. Unrecognizable yes, but understanding was complete. The vibrational morse code spelled out what my severed head knew… that I was a headless black scaled fish and what a  joy it is in being different.

I realized that years ago I had let the world cut around my neck and sheathed my head within a kibisis bag for safe keeping. Darker and scarier to the world than my body lie my head, with its hair hissing snakes striking anyone who gazed, a wagging voice cutting bloodlessly, and eyes bulging and twisting for envisioning new worlds. This head has always been a distant part of me yet through the years of my marriage I banished her as I exhausted myself in trying to become someone else. Through the years she would whisper to me, how long can you keep this up? and I would pretend not to hear her in my madness of trying to evolve into my own silvery scaled fish. 

The virus has created the space for me to fall deep into the sea where I am isolated and undistracted. From this place I am able to see how I no longer want to swim with those silver scales and how much energy it has cost me for their attention. Without the reflection of the world I am finding a space where I can be me, black scales and all. The inside world is becoming rich, the seas teaming with life. And a calling from a body I once knew, has gotten closer as if she were overhead on the pier sending me these symbols through the dark seawater. Each night I count between the visions…. 1001… 1002…1003… 

The lightening gets closer and I await our reunion. 

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