From such a craggy ridge as this, a plunge into the water could lead to a surface covered with a kind of plant. The plant entices divers to become entangled: green and leafy, vine-like invitation to a different kind of world. Once captured by this most extraordinary foliage of the deep, a visitor will spot an underwater tram that travels to a place where homes are bubbles tinted in the rainbow hues and lit (as if emotionally) from within. Lit bubbles are inhabited; the unlit ones, they are another matter altogether. Now, tram passenger, your job is, choose a bubble, lit. Look over there, the color and the glow: this is enough to make a diver think she's found what she has always looked for (though she never even knew that she'd been looking until now). Hold out a finger. Gold-dipped is how fingers look when pointed at such hopeful sights as these. The tram will stop, all seats will lean, and, ushered by the little wing-finned creatures congregating in a cluster near the tram, you'll swim quite confidently out.
      As you proceed towards your selection, passing in between the darks and lights, you more than likely are recalling leaves and vines that grew as if in an attempt to cover everything there ever was. This overgrowth, a type of memory in fact, it rocks you in the manner of the darkest underwater pleasure you have yet encountered: dotted with bright underwater blooms, the covering (such a strangely futuristic image) brings to mind a kind of drifting. "Drifting" is another word, of course, for being driven by the Himalayan wind that rushes hard across a mountaintop and causes snow to move in such a way to cover rocks and stumps along the ridges and the flat spots; "burial" is for making space for yet more bodies underneath the sun-swept green and rolling surface of the earth.
      Ignore the unlit bubbles, please. Go towards the one you chose when you were on the tram. And swim on just as confidently over pale and spiky corals and the incandescent creatures of the deep that sway like plants possessed with delicate illuminated skeletal agility. Such stunning colors, such impossibly alluring silent movement—"They will no doubt be returning to my thoughts," you tell yourself, "long after all of this is over" (like a memory of a mother, father...though such memories always seem to blur along the lines and empty out inside until they've filled in rather suddenly with dirt and clumps and rocky, tufty stuff). An edgeless, dirt-filled image such as that can bring the thickest tears to one's as yet unopened eyes. "It's like a tower that was there until it suddenly was not there," you tell yourself, "and what is there instead is something ghostlike; edgeless, but vertiginous. Pure heartache from the bottom to the top."
      The tram? Still waiting; though your colorful little escorts, you will notice, have already flitted off.
      Out here, so far below it all, you are presented for the first time ever with the image of a wide expanse of dirt-and-tuft-plugged holes. "I can't get in," you think. "It all seems hopeless. Pointless." Working quickly, though, and kicking lightly, you will soon discover that the surface of a bubble is not totally impenetrable. "Can't be. He or she is in there somewhere. Had to get in, has to get out. Somehow." And, in fact, there is a door that you will find (look for its etched-in outline to have cut across your finger) after you've become so gently captured by the current swirling softly now around the bubble you have chosen, lit, it's nice to see, as if compassionately from within. And this suggestion of a door, when spoken into, either opens or does not. That's how things go around here, where the bubbles that are lit, along with those as dark as anything, make for a kind of pattern, seen from up above, no different from the sky at night if watched from underneath a certain depth of dirt. In any case, the tram has got to scoot. For those who hover about what seems to be a doorway, trams cannot just sit and wait out here indefinitely.

passion (asleep)

jane unrue