Sinking is familiar to me as I feel the water fill in all the gaps. I come to rest on the bottom, bouncing slightly up as if I were on the moon, before settling in to the silt. I am comfortable there, on the bottom of the lake. Every once and awhile there will be a day where I drift up to the surface and breathe the air like everybody else, but it has become clear that this is not something I need to do. My lungs fill with oxygen as I am reminded what the outside of a lake smells like. I feel the unyielding heat of the sun on my face directly, without the barrier of water in between. I often stare at it, the distant orb, far above the bottom of the lake.

And when I am done with the air and with the sun, I float right back down to where I came from. Far from the light, but not apart from it. I look around and see different plants gently billowing in the water. Little fish dart around one another in small pods. I am the only human, as far as I know, and I wonder if anyone else had ever remained on the bottom of this lake like I do, as if it were home.

Because that’s the thing. Maybe the sun, that closest and most obvious bright and glittering target isn’t everything. There is the blackness of space and the brilliance of other stars and planets with moons encircling them. And the equally mysterious waters where I now find myself. A place where I can neither breathe, nor die, rendering me with a simultaneous sense of uneasiness and belonging as I land again and again on the bottom of this particular lake.

The people I know are not far away, on the land and nearer to the sun, where it seems like we are all supposed to be. What does that mean for me? What am I doing down here alone, or am I?

Questions I might have answered a long time ago had I not spent so much time reaching for something that was never meant to be mine.

Luciana, 29