Paradise Found
I've been debating whether or not to post this thing, but after reading over it again, I realized it's not as embarassing an attempt as I'd first thought. Basically this is a short story (barely 4 pages) which I'd been working on as an experiment with minimalism. Whether or not it worked, I'm not sure, but I don't think it's too bad. There's a strong element of philosophy in it, of course, but there usually is in my fiction. At any rate, I'd be very interested in hearing what people think, particularly whether or not my message was clear enough (I'm not sure all of the symbolism was as apparent as I wanted it to be).
Paradise Found
Down here, everything moves slower. Forests of green silk sway with an underwater breeze; smooth leaves twisting, undulating with easy grace. I watch the living things moving in a silent ballet of light and shadow. Without sound the world becomes a place of whispering colors and thoughts murmured quietly like secrets.
The ocean accepts me as though I belong, guiding my clumsy limbs with maternal affection. My plastic fins are ugly imitations of nature, their bright, childish presence clownish compared to the delicate power inherent in the creatures swimming past and around me, laughing at my attempts. A little yellow fish pauses for a moment to inspect me, and asks, politely, why I’ve come. I can tell from her expression that she must think I’m crazy.
I shrug, but I do not answer her. With a shake of her gleaming head, she disappears.
******
I was sixteen the first time I went diving. We were on vacation in Hawaii; my brother couldn’t come because of work, so in the end it was just Dad and me, fishing for words in the pond of awkward silence we often found ourselves wading through whenever we were alone. The diving had been his idea, and at first I was hesitant. I disliked the hot, clingy wet suits that smelled vaguely of mildew and chemicals, and sitting across from my father on the messy, old boat I felt stupid and embarrassed.
“We’re here,” said the little man behind the wheel, winking at my discomfort, as if sharing a private joke. One of the hot pink flamingoes on his t-shirt rolled its eyes, and I smiled.
Here didn’t look any different from Back There or Over That Way, but when I glanced down and caught a flurry of brightly colored movement beneath the surface, I changed my mind. Perhaps there was something special Here after all…
Dad, like always, was the first to take the plunge. Without warning, he tipped backwards over the railing and fell into the water with a loud splash.
“Come on in,” he called to me, smiling dumbly, his graying hair plastered over his eyes. “The water’s fine!”
Cautiously I shuffled over to the silver-runged ladder, shining perilously bright in my eyes. It was an act of deep concentration, moving around with big, floppy feet on a deck crowded with rope and malevolent looking odds and ends. Dad sighed impatiently from below, but I ignored him. The metal was hot underneath my hands as I lowered myself down gently. I prided myself on my body’s ability to part the still ocean with barely a ripple, glaring prudishly at my father as he kicked up showers of diamonds, flashing shooting star bright on their brief journey back to the sea. The azure skies made him a child again, but on my father with his broad shoulders and serious eyes, this display of immaturity was more embarrassing than endearing.
I looked away from him, replacing his laughter with the sound of waves lapping softly at the boat, running their formless hands over the backs of my thighs as I hovered, half-poised on the ladder, in transition between worlds. The weight of an oxygen tank strapped parasite-like to my back dragged me further down, pulling me into the ocean…
As I stood on the last rung, submerged up to my shoulders, my hand slipped and quite suddenly I was gone.
I found myself in an environment made entirely of blue. Here and there, shafts of silver and gold sunlight partitioned the water, staying for only a moment before fading away again to appear somewhere else. Above me was a shifting lattice work of light, and below… Below was a sprawling metropolis of life, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Tall, white skyscrapers of coral dominated a city peopled by strange and alien citizens. In that brief moment I took in as much as I could in wonder; here there was so much life, thriving in what had seemed to me, at first, to be a hostile landscape. And yet, with a feeling like an epiphany, I began to realize that I had sorely misjudged this place, the Ocean.
The sea was brilliant, quiet and kind: it harbored these fragile creatures with their paper thin flesh and their long, slender bodies, protecting them from the harsh world beyond the surface. I felt as though I had entered the very womb of the earth.
For the first time in many years, I began to feel at peace.
******
It’s a strange thing, to lose someone. To walk through life, day after day with only leaden, grief grey smudges left to outline the places where that person should have been. One night I went to bed with red eyes and when I awoke in the morning, someone had come into my home and erased her presence from every room. All over the place I found the little clues of her existence, left behind as if to prove that she really had been here once. They told, in lipstick and favorite mugs and special dog-eared books, all the fragments of her life, piecing together the patchwork quilt story of who she was.
But there were no hints, that morning, to tell me where she might have gone.
I watched that day as they encased my mother’s pale body, sealing it into a long, heavy black pill which they lowered carefully into the gaping mouth of the earth. Watched as they filled it up with dirt and then, suddenly, gulp! - my mother was gone. She had been swallowed whole by the gluttonous earth, leaving no scrap of her warm smile or soft hands for the rest of us. There was a part of me that wanted desperately to run over there and pry those brown lips open, to reach down that cool throat lined with worms and stones and tear away the wooden shell that hid my mother. I needed to see her face again, so badly; already she was fading, already I was beginning to forget the exact color of her eyes or the red curves of her mouth.
But my traitorous feet were held still by the earth, toes rooted in so deep you’d need a shovel just to find them, and no matter how much I needed to see her, I was shackled there, unable to move.
I felt hot tears sting my eyes. The earth had swallowed my mother.
******
There is a sense of weightlessness here, of all my burdens detaching themselves from my tired shoulders the moment I slip from one world into the next. Even the oxygen tank can’t hold me down, heavy as it is above the surface. The ocean helps me to carry it, making everything calm and easy.
I drift through the water with no particular destination in mind. It doesn’t matter where I’m going, because when I’m down here I’ve already arrived. That secret place isn’t a location, it’s something inside -- but I’m crippled by all the walls that block me from that inner sanctuary, and only the sea can lift me over them.
My mother was the first to figure things out. She was different; I don’t remember her very well anymore, but the one thing, the one part of her that time has never been able to erase from my mind is my memory of her silence. My father is a quiet person as well, but he wasn’t always. Before my mother died, he was loud and cheerful and made the whole house noisy with his laughter.
Dad never laughs like that now.
He and my mother were complete opposites. For all his boisterous impulsivity, my mother always remained a shy, introverted woman. People look back on her now and say, “She must’ve been so depressed” and “Why didn’t she ever say anything?” But they don’t understand that my mother’s silences were full of a million words, each more beautiful and precious than the last. I think Dad must’ve seen that, because he’s always trying so hard to fill the quiet with meaning but it only comes out as noise. My dad’s silences are the loudest I’ve ever heard.
My mother was a sage, or perhaps a prophet; or maybe it was Buddhist enlightenment that made her glow with some strange knowledge that the rest of us could only guess at. Her smiles were puzzles that gave away nothing and everything all at once. It wasn’t until I went diving that I began to understand how the pieces fit. It wasn’t until I found peace within the ocean that I learned how to make music without sound, how to weave tapestries of sunlight and write poetry upon blades of grass and flower petals.
Happiness, art, love, contentment - these are not things that can be created, but rather found. No one has realized it yet aside from me, but she discovered them long before I ever did. My mother grew up beside the ocean, and she knew its secrets the way I know them now. Looking back, I can see the way she held them within herself like something precious and fragile; an unborn child, sleeping deep inside of her. The ocean makes us mother and infant all in one, a circle of life that completes and fulfills itself eternally.
Someday I’ll come down here and stay forever. I’ve seen it in my dreams. Ever since she left, I’ve dreamed of water, embracing and choking me, holding me carefully as it gently invades my body. It used to frighten me; I’d wake up gasping for air like a beached fish, mouth gaping wide, struggling to free my helpless, flailing limbs from the restraining, sweat-damp sheets. But now the panic has disappeared, leaving behind a sense of surrender. I’ve found the peace that comes from giving up. If all things are inevitable, then why should we fear them? There is only the present, the ever-changing, ever-fluid now. I think that the secret of life lies in giving yourself entirely to the moment, shedding the burdens of struggle for the weightlessness of submission.
For now though, I let the ocean carry me to the surface.
Fin.
Paradise Found
Down here, everything moves slower. Forests of green silk sway with an underwater breeze; smooth leaves twisting, undulating with easy grace. I watch the living things moving in a silent ballet of light and shadow. Without sound the world becomes a place of whispering colors and thoughts murmured quietly like secrets.
The ocean accepts me as though I belong, guiding my clumsy limbs with maternal affection. My plastic fins are ugly imitations of nature, their bright, childish presence clownish compared to the delicate power inherent in the creatures swimming past and around me, laughing at my attempts. A little yellow fish pauses for a moment to inspect me, and asks, politely, why I’ve come. I can tell from her expression that she must think I’m crazy.
I shrug, but I do not answer her. With a shake of her gleaming head, she disappears.
******
I was sixteen the first time I went diving. We were on vacation in Hawaii; my brother couldn’t come because of work, so in the end it was just Dad and me, fishing for words in the pond of awkward silence we often found ourselves wading through whenever we were alone. The diving had been his idea, and at first I was hesitant. I disliked the hot, clingy wet suits that smelled vaguely of mildew and chemicals, and sitting across from my father on the messy, old boat I felt stupid and embarrassed.
“We’re here,” said the little man behind the wheel, winking at my discomfort, as if sharing a private joke. One of the hot pink flamingoes on his t-shirt rolled its eyes, and I smiled.
Here didn’t look any different from Back There or Over That Way, but when I glanced down and caught a flurry of brightly colored movement beneath the surface, I changed my mind. Perhaps there was something special Here after all…
Dad, like always, was the first to take the plunge. Without warning, he tipped backwards over the railing and fell into the water with a loud splash.
“Come on in,” he called to me, smiling dumbly, his graying hair plastered over his eyes. “The water’s fine!”
Cautiously I shuffled over to the silver-runged ladder, shining perilously bright in my eyes. It was an act of deep concentration, moving around with big, floppy feet on a deck crowded with rope and malevolent looking odds and ends. Dad sighed impatiently from below, but I ignored him. The metal was hot underneath my hands as I lowered myself down gently. I prided myself on my body’s ability to part the still ocean with barely a ripple, glaring prudishly at my father as he kicked up showers of diamonds, flashing shooting star bright on their brief journey back to the sea. The azure skies made him a child again, but on my father with his broad shoulders and serious eyes, this display of immaturity was more embarrassing than endearing.
I looked away from him, replacing his laughter with the sound of waves lapping softly at the boat, running their formless hands over the backs of my thighs as I hovered, half-poised on the ladder, in transition between worlds. The weight of an oxygen tank strapped parasite-like to my back dragged me further down, pulling me into the ocean…
As I stood on the last rung, submerged up to my shoulders, my hand slipped and quite suddenly I was gone.
I found myself in an environment made entirely of blue. Here and there, shafts of silver and gold sunlight partitioned the water, staying for only a moment before fading away again to appear somewhere else. Above me was a shifting lattice work of light, and below… Below was a sprawling metropolis of life, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Tall, white skyscrapers of coral dominated a city peopled by strange and alien citizens. In that brief moment I took in as much as I could in wonder; here there was so much life, thriving in what had seemed to me, at first, to be a hostile landscape. And yet, with a feeling like an epiphany, I began to realize that I had sorely misjudged this place, the Ocean.
The sea was brilliant, quiet and kind: it harbored these fragile creatures with their paper thin flesh and their long, slender bodies, protecting them from the harsh world beyond the surface. I felt as though I had entered the very womb of the earth.
For the first time in many years, I began to feel at peace.
******
It’s a strange thing, to lose someone. To walk through life, day after day with only leaden, grief grey smudges left to outline the places where that person should have been. One night I went to bed with red eyes and when I awoke in the morning, someone had come into my home and erased her presence from every room. All over the place I found the little clues of her existence, left behind as if to prove that she really had been here once. They told, in lipstick and favorite mugs and special dog-eared books, all the fragments of her life, piecing together the patchwork quilt story of who she was.
But there were no hints, that morning, to tell me where she might have gone.
I watched that day as they encased my mother’s pale body, sealing it into a long, heavy black pill which they lowered carefully into the gaping mouth of the earth. Watched as they filled it up with dirt and then, suddenly, gulp! - my mother was gone. She had been swallowed whole by the gluttonous earth, leaving no scrap of her warm smile or soft hands for the rest of us. There was a part of me that wanted desperately to run over there and pry those brown lips open, to reach down that cool throat lined with worms and stones and tear away the wooden shell that hid my mother. I needed to see her face again, so badly; already she was fading, already I was beginning to forget the exact color of her eyes or the red curves of her mouth.
But my traitorous feet were held still by the earth, toes rooted in so deep you’d need a shovel just to find them, and no matter how much I needed to see her, I was shackled there, unable to move.
I felt hot tears sting my eyes. The earth had swallowed my mother.
******
There is a sense of weightlessness here, of all my burdens detaching themselves from my tired shoulders the moment I slip from one world into the next. Even the oxygen tank can’t hold me down, heavy as it is above the surface. The ocean helps me to carry it, making everything calm and easy.
I drift through the water with no particular destination in mind. It doesn’t matter where I’m going, because when I’m down here I’ve already arrived. That secret place isn’t a location, it’s something inside -- but I’m crippled by all the walls that block me from that inner sanctuary, and only the sea can lift me over them.
My mother was the first to figure things out. She was different; I don’t remember her very well anymore, but the one thing, the one part of her that time has never been able to erase from my mind is my memory of her silence. My father is a quiet person as well, but he wasn’t always. Before my mother died, he was loud and cheerful and made the whole house noisy with his laughter.
Dad never laughs like that now.
He and my mother were complete opposites. For all his boisterous impulsivity, my mother always remained a shy, introverted woman. People look back on her now and say, “She must’ve been so depressed” and “Why didn’t she ever say anything?” But they don’t understand that my mother’s silences were full of a million words, each more beautiful and precious than the last. I think Dad must’ve seen that, because he’s always trying so hard to fill the quiet with meaning but it only comes out as noise. My dad’s silences are the loudest I’ve ever heard.
My mother was a sage, or perhaps a prophet; or maybe it was Buddhist enlightenment that made her glow with some strange knowledge that the rest of us could only guess at. Her smiles were puzzles that gave away nothing and everything all at once. It wasn’t until I went diving that I began to understand how the pieces fit. It wasn’t until I found peace within the ocean that I learned how to make music without sound, how to weave tapestries of sunlight and write poetry upon blades of grass and flower petals.
Happiness, art, love, contentment - these are not things that can be created, but rather found. No one has realized it yet aside from me, but she discovered them long before I ever did. My mother grew up beside the ocean, and she knew its secrets the way I know them now. Looking back, I can see the way she held them within herself like something precious and fragile; an unborn child, sleeping deep inside of her. The ocean makes us mother and infant all in one, a circle of life that completes and fulfills itself eternally.
Someday I’ll come down here and stay forever. I’ve seen it in my dreams. Ever since she left, I’ve dreamed of water, embracing and choking me, holding me carefully as it gently invades my body. It used to frighten me; I’d wake up gasping for air like a beached fish, mouth gaping wide, struggling to free my helpless, flailing limbs from the restraining, sweat-damp sheets. But now the panic has disappeared, leaving behind a sense of surrender. I’ve found the peace that comes from giving up. If all things are inevitable, then why should we fear them? There is only the present, the ever-changing, ever-fluid now. I think that the secret of life lies in giving yourself entirely to the moment, shedding the burdens of struggle for the weightlessness of submission.
For now though, I let the ocean carry me to the surface.
Fin.