With a handful of moss, I dove into the murky water. I sank, and felt the fluid twist around my arms, stomach, and thighs, dragging me down. I now belonged to her.

Soon I wouldn't be able to see, as the light fled upwards, away from that which it knew would follow.

My hands hit a contradiction, sand: hard and soft. Saliva leaked from my mouth at the thought of what lay beneath. I too was hard where once I was soft. With fear! With anticipation! I was consumed with something they have yet to name. Something like lust after disinfection. A sin so pure, I felt like God yearning for a universe yet to be imagined.

They said if I took moss from the place where the sun melts skin, I would set such things in motion. And the agony was beautiful, as I scrambled up the rock to the pinnacle of that cliff. As flesh dripped off my bones, I picked up a handful of green relief. It soothed the raw exposed tendons of my hand, and I dove.

And now, something stirred within me, a soul I had previously been unable to recognize. Now it gleamed. I watched it glow beneath my skin. I felt it press outwards, like a baby waiting to be born. It was reaching out for a new world.

It breathed the light which I used to see her clearly. The word mermaid would cast illusions in your mind. You would not imagine this beast with any accuracy. Her skin, a texture you've never felt, both revolting and enchanting. Upon the sight, I gagged. Something you could call a finger traced the ridges of my throat. I nearly came.

But we had just begun.

I held out the moss, and as she took it in her mouth it disappeared from view. Then she took me in her mouth, and view disappeared from me. Black didn't return to me then, though. I saw and didn't see. I simply did not have the capacity for more than the sense of touch. I felt the moss pressed against the flesh of her cheeks, and the gentle sting of pointed teeth. I felt it on the smallest scale. I was gliding between molecules, with the algae and the things they consume and excrete, dancing with the chemical composition of her spit and that which she had eaten last.

I felt. Not in the approximate way you are used to feeling, but truly, wholly. Everything.

As she eased, my soul could be seen in front me then. It pulled itself away from me. I was becoming a mother to myself. The skin thin and taught, stretched many feet toward her. Horrifying, and yet, only natural in that moment. A tongue slid from her wide, grotesque mouth and slithered across that threshold of tender flesh which kept my essence from drifting away entirely. I shivered with glee.

Something, like legs, or a tail, or some combination of the two, split then, not with ease, but with a bloody tear. I was beckoned closer, and embraced, pressed against the thick film coating her rough skin. They wrapped around my hips, and where her mouth connected my body with the world, her loins dragged me out of it entirely. Her lips pressed to mine and we became an auroborus.

Her blood wafted through the ripples we made in the water, sliding into my nostrils and mouth. It tasted like an ancient rust. I saw far above us, ships sailing across oceans, and impaled on the rocks. I saw fish torn apart by dolphins, and dolphins torn apart by time. I saw the water turn to acid and back to water and then to air. I saw myself turn to carbon. I saw it all, in fast forward and then in reverse. I saw the decomposition of time, and then I watched its reconstruction. When I found my body again, I wasn't sure if all the time had passed, like a finite resource, or if none had been used at all.

With the movement of the universe, I felt her muscles stretch, and compress around me. In her motion, I felt entropy and the return to order. Her hips slid around me, both entirely chaotic, and precisely calculated. I felt myself being brought like a tourist through every part of her body, through every part of every thing. I felt myself slide into place among the rest of her, and I understood this was where I fit among it all.

How long it continued would be an irrelevant question. We were divorced from time. It only was until it wasn't. Until I felt her body grip me with a strength that must have shattered many of my bones. Until she quivered with a force liable to send tsunamis to distant lands. And I was ready to join her, until I felt a competing desire.

Somewhere within me.

Somewhere deep and quiet, a small worm of a thought, wiggling to the top,

A speck I could have missed but didn't.

BREATHE

It said

I NEED TO BREATHE.

I was leaking out of myself: blood, bone, spit, feces. Everything that was over inside, now swam around me. She had let me into the sea and the sea into me. I was deconstructed. I was a cloud of suffering and ecstacy, and yet there was a last sensation which danced around the edges of my experience, waiting to make its entrance. The sensation of death. I had been ready for it all, I had lusted for it, to be torn from my personhood and laid out. But, I was not so prepared to lose my being.

I did not need need to be a person, or an animal, or anything recognizeable. But to not be anything. To not be aware of not being? To surrender myself to becoming a flash in the play she would show the one who came next? I yearned to swim upwards.

I convulsed, and flicked and twitched what was left of a body. I twisted and pushed and pulled. But there was nothing left to move, there were no pieces left under my control. There were no pieces left to control. I was a pile of what had once been. I was nothing. It occurred to me then, that I have not been anything for a very long time.

For in that long passed moment, death had obeyed, and receded. It no longer even remembers who I was, for it only concerns itself with the living. I am no such thing. I am not even sand for there is no longer sand. I am what has been left behind after it all passed by. I was shown everything, and invited to join in the chorus. I refused, and now the song has ended.

I am. But that is all I am. And that is all there is, is that I am.