There has been a compromise.
A giving way.
A sudden overwhelming permeability.
She is flooded . . . the world becomes liquid and passes through her skin.
All of which she is conscious becomes a seething roiling fluid of color and noise and smell and taste. She is aware even as she releases her hold on the old reality that boundaries have slipped. The reliability of her sensations dissolves against her panicked explorations like spun sugar against her tongue . . . she hears and smells the concrete; she tastes and feels the nameless faces that melt before her eyes; she hears the green of the grass and tastes the blue of the sky. Emotions and thoughts become tangible things that spin before her eyes. All is chaos and all is one and nothing is separate and she cannot breathe.
The world is liquid chaos and passes through her skin.
There is to be a drowning from within.
She turns and stares into the whirling frenzy of aqueous sensation and seeks a landmark, something with which to guide her movements from here to anywhere else.
She finds the horizon, the one meridian left to her on this earth.
She moves quickly to seek the edge of the world.
The edge of the world is river-limned.
She stands beside the river at the edge of the world and works to breathe as the air becomes liquid and she becomes liquid and all is liquid and breathing is impossible.
Focus on one small thing.
A bubble. She needs a bubble of air. Something in which to encase herself while she fights to regain control.
She closes her eyes.
She closes her eyes and slips through the liquid of her mind into the past. She reaches back. Reaches back to a tube of viscous emerald fluid . . . shaped like a tube of toothpaste, but larger. A clear container in which is suspended a single perfect slow-moving bubble of air. She folds herself small and fetal and slides through its permeable membrane. She is within that bubble, seeking the surface no matter how the world is oriented and spun. Slowly rising, stubbornly pushing the jellied liquid aside.
Seeking the surface.
She is within that bubble.
That bubble exists within the memoried confines of her mother’s long-ago tube of Prell Shampoo. She rides that bubble to seek the surface again and again as her little-girl long-ago slippery bath-wet hands turn the tube in fascination. The bubble is a small gap in the green emerald beauty . . . a small gap through which to see clearly.
That’s what she needs now . . . a small gap through which to see clearly.
A bubble.
She seeks the surface.
Seeks to stop the process that threatens to make her part of the liquid of the world.
Seeks the air.
Breathes.
Breathes.
Breathes.
As she breathes, she becomes more aware of the river that flows before her.
She stares into its muddy eddied surface . . . there is movement seemingly from below, as though hands from beneath are reaching up to smooth the contours of the darkly liquid sky. Fingertips from beneath press and worry at the ragged edges of reality, ensuring there is no small gap through which to see clearly.
She breathes.
Breathes.
Breathes.
Reality shifts and the river is a brown warm blanket endlessly tucked and patted smooth by loving invisible hands from above. She feels the joy of those tucked beneath its comfort. She feels the warmth and ecstasy of slipping beneath that blanket. The blanket is a permeable membrane, and she knows that she would slip right through to safety and comfort on the other side. She would be welcomed, and unseen hands from above would pat the blanket smooth over her shape forever.
She seeks the surface.
Seeks to stop the process that threatens to make her part of the liquid of the world.
She breathes.
Breathes.
Breathes.
She stands by the river and watches as it swirls and pulses before her.
The river becomes a ribbon of brown rippling silk, a separate gorgeous thing.
Liquid that is not her.
She stands and breathes and feels the waves within her subside as the liquid chaos of the world recedes. The world passes through her skin again, but this time in exodus. The million pinpricks of vulnerability that allowed this flood now force that same liquid out, and she feels the needled pain of expulsion through this porosity as equilibrium is restored.
She stands and breathes.
Breathes.
Breathes.
The river is a turgid expanse of muddy pulsing water.
The grass is green and metal-scented.
The sky is blue and smooth.
Her emotions are her own.
Order restored.
Boundaries in place.
She stands.
Herself.
She is joined.
She hears the worried words of her family. She sees the concern on their faces. She reaches to touch them, one by one.
They lost her for a few minutes.
They have found her.
Just moments after she found herself.
And now . . .
She moves with them . . .
Into the moments that follow.
People?
This is a moment from another time that is not today.
Time, like rivers, flows.
It was only a moment.
