Rocked By Deep Water

The water is beneath you. Deep water. Warm.

You are floating on the surface. Back resting on the water. Ears below the surface so the world above is muffled and soft. The water is warm enough that the boundary between your body and it is gentle. Not a sharp border. A gradual one.

The surface of deep water is never completely still. Even in the calmest bay, even in the most sheltered inlet, there is motion. The deep currents moving underneath, reaching the surface as a slow, barely perceptible movement. A rise. A fall. A rise. A fall.

You are on this movement. The water rocks you. Not violently. With the slowness of deep things. The ocean swell that began as weather thousands of miles away and has spent days traveling here, spending itself in these slow pulses, arriving at your back as the most gentle rocking.

Up. A small rise. The water lifting you a few inches. The horizon tilting a fraction. Down. The slow return. The water receiving your weight back.

Up. Down.

This is the first motion. Before breathing. Before heartbeat. The amniotic rocking. Every mammal who grew in a womb knows this rhythm from before they had a self to know it with. It is stored somewhere prior to memory. Which is why it does what it does now.

The body has been on edge all day. The nervous system calibrated for a world that asks attention of it constantly. But here, on the water, the rocking is resolving that calibration. Slowly. The nervous system reading the rhythm and doing what nervous systems do with safe repetition: downregulating. The alert becoming less alert. The readiness becoming rest.

Up. Down.

The water is warm below you. The air is warm above you. You require no effort to stay afloat. The water is doing that. The water is entirely committed to holding you and requires nothing in exchange. Float. Only float.

The sounds are muffled. The world above the water is quiet and far. The stars, if there are stars, are far. The moon is reflected on the surface. You are between the reflected sky and the real one, floating in the layer between two versions of the universe.

Up. Down.

The pulse of it is getting slower. Or you are getting slower. Or both, together, finding the same rate.

The eyelids are heavy with the weight of water. Not drowning. Rocking. The water holds you.

Let the rocking have you.

Up. Down.

Down.

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