With a hand full of moss, I dove into the murky water. What is seen will not be unseen, what is known cannot be unknown. Betrayal looks like a patch of moss, and growing up looks like death.

The shapes of everyone I loved, the colours of everyone I hated, the taste of a faith that felt like longing... all tapestried across the green ceiling of scum and spawn above me as I sank.

Down.

Down.

She is down there.

The mangrove web played cats cradle and laughed in the way roots do. How could I know the ways of roots? I didn't... I do now. There is so much below them. Of course they would laugh.

Silt rain to blanket me. Fine enough to fit in every wrinkle I couldn't prevent. There is nowhere to hide from time.

I welcome the silicate softness, to bleed in my blood... preserve me. Please, preserve me. But not like this. Not how I am. Preserve me how she saw me.

She was below me. She had been for so long. Sleeping in peat and dreaming of coal. Oh, if time weren't so cruel.

Anoxic abyss, let not the pressure of the world change us. I wished her preserved, but she had loftier goals. A future of anthracite.

I promised I would never touch her. I would never interfere. I would die before I broke that promise... and so I did.

Could they find us, one day, entwined like this, and tell false stories of our love?

The bog bodies who met their deaths in an embrace.

One that neither of us felt in life.