A Sort Of Sea

Warm. A kind of bathwater warm. And clear. So you can see everything through it as though it were the clearest glass. As though it were a kind of liquid glass. A very pure sort of glass that has been melted and tastes like a sweet-water sea. That is sweet in the way artesian water is sweet or a river out beyond any hint of civilization is pure or can be because it is fundamentally artesian. Fundamentally welled up from the deeps of the earth. Water that was made when time was young and that’s been filtered through sedimentary rock for. Oh. Thousands of years.

But warm. Bathwater warm. And because it is sweet-water, there are no sharks, for example. Or one believes there are no sharks and other kinds of toothy sea creatures that chomp. And as one looks into the liquid glass, there is nothing but light and a waviness, a liquidity, that is soothing. Ripples of light. Patches of light moving on the sea bottom sand. Sun broken into uncountable shards scattered across the surface. Wave shadows traveling across the sand on the bottom. Bands of light synchronous with the waves, moving across the sand. Shadow chasing light. Light chasing shadow.

One lies back in this. One lies upon one’s back and is buoyed up. Is lifted up upon the surface of the water like one is lying on a water bed. The water conforming to one’s shape. Not sinking. Not blowing. Not treading water. Just lying back and drifting. Gently floating wherever the water wants to go.
Or one stands, one’s feet in the lovely sand down here. The lovely blond sand that is fine and soothing on one’s feet. That seems to massage the feet with fingers the size of sand grains. As the water laves one’s body. As the water warms and cools one’s body, at once. Warming and cooling. Warming and cooling.

We are in a bay of some sort. A bay populous with small green islands. A bay that is placid and blue and green near the shore of the islands where there is a wide margin of sand running up to the green. Running up to the cocoanut trees, green-topped and gray-trunked, interspersed along the beach and up the beach to the dense green foliage beyond. The interior side of the wide sand beaches.

I say we. I say the plural because others are in the water also. Other men and women and children. I don’t know what I am, whether a child or a man. I think I am a man, but I may not be. I may be merely a child. I don’t know what to look for, all of a sudden. I don’t know how to tell, for some reason.
And as I’m looking out into the distance, I notice also how even far out. Even what looks like maybe a mile away. People are standing or lying upon the water. As if the bay is quite shallow. This seems perfectly natural but a little odd. A little unusual. Men and women and children. All wading like this. Up to their thighs or their waists or their chests in the beautiful, calm, gentle, clear water. Or floating. Just floating this way and that. Eyes closed or open. It doesn’t matter.

All of us just feeling the delicious feeling of this warm, smooth, cleansing water on our bodies and the massaging of the sand on our feet. And the slight cooling breeze blowing.

We look up. All together, we look up. There on the horizon, there is something. It’s something new. We don’t know what it is. We watch it, waiting for it to resolve. Waiting for it to become something we know. We can understand.
At first, it’s an unusual ripple on the water. An unusual wave pattern on the water. An interruption there of some kind we haven’t seen before. We wait. Then it looks like there’s something in the water, but we don’t know what it is. Time passes. Whatever it is gets bigger. It gets bigger and bigger. It seems to shine. It seems a little like a little sun coming toward us on the water. We’ll wait and see. We wait, deep in all this pleasure, for something to resolve. For whatever it is to clarify. To become whatever it is becoming.