In the Blue
a little musing, written in response to a request by a friend.
Every day tells the same story, but we move through the chapters as if they were new, novel, or unique. That is what this world seems to me: an ocean. It is, in fact, utterly ocean. I seem to be the only man left in this submerged aquarium—aqua mundi, mors rerum (the water of the world is the death of things).
Alas. My fate, long appealed and argued against, no longer sustains me; I no longer find meaning in the search. Doesn’t all this blue symbolize a sadness so supreme not even Poseidon could uplift? All these currents and motions, waves and tempests, only for me to acknowledge. How sad. How little. How… depressing.
If only Venus herself could emerge from the foam of the sea, which I see in the distance like a mirage. Oh, if only I had company—someone to lean on, someone to hold and call my own. Alas. My fate: I am alone. Alone. Alone. So many times repeated in my head, so many more times it must be proved true in my life.
My life is a sort of perverse fate. It is a malignancy. All this sweltering of evil cannot be overcome. Am I beginning to go mad? Surely I must be going mad. I haven’t seen myself in days, months, years, no… decades perhaps. Centuries? No. Yes. No. Maybe. That is all I can offer in such uncertainty: maybe. Maybe—the refuge of a timid mind unable to accept what is not yet known.
Curse all this water. Where is everything, anyway? Where has anything gone? What of my past? Didn’t I have a family? Perhaps. Perhaps I did. Alas. Now I am alone. Woefully alone, without a soul with whom to share all these sorrows. Look how blue I am. Look at my life. LOOK AT IT! Isn’t it something to be at least a little beset by?
What sorrowful reflections. What wicked cogitations. I may as well describe myself as water: a solid, liquid, gas, and solvent—I am all this and perhaps a little more. None of it makes sense, though. Wasn’t I something before water? Wasn’t I me? A being beyond water; a powerful thing: a man?
If I may venture a solitary guess—a guess worthy only of a man who cannot tell it to anyone else—I would say that I was, in fact, a man before the state I find myself in now. Yes. I like to think I was. I was powerful, bold, ample, strong, perennial with the Earth! Now? Just a thing without notice.
But… what’s this? Is this… me? Something approaches. Something I haven’t seen before. Something I never thought I would see, in fact. Do I turn around? Is this my fate? Oh, my life, my life, this terror. Let me stand as I was, mid-step, and see what approaches.