by Laura Secor
Breathe deeply, and imagine you are floating in a crimson sea, buoyant, warm and bright. Breathe in rose madder, flood yourself with quinacridone red, a merlot woman in a burgundy sea, sinking gently, breathing in the cinnamon water as though it were crisp clear air, tasty with persimmon wine, sighing tomato sighs as you sink into the wine-dark sea, sinking your hands into watermelon wavelets, cranberry curlicues of current. Then a vermillion wave slams into you and through you.
Breathe deeply and sink into the orange sea that lies beneath the crimson sea, filling your lungs with the juice of a hundred crushed papayas, feeling the flesh of a thousand mangoes squishing between your toes, drifting on the petals of a million tiger lilies. The dying-coal glow of fire strikes the watery lens of your eye, your body is radiant with auburn light in the sienna sea, your long limbs the cloudy tendrils of a fiery sunset of cadmium orange, and your heart is swallowed in the smoky topaz eyes of a predator infinitely huge.
A field of sunflowers bursts open where your heart used to be, tender pale petals shading into vivid aureolin. The first daffodils of February work their way into you, you taste the juice of ripe lemons on the tip of your tongue, golden waves of tequila slide down your throat and send hot amber fire through your arteries. The light, diffuse through the water, surrounds you with the warmth of dawn in spring, sun the palest of golds on the horizon.
Tendrils of tender greenbean shoots work their way into the lemon-vibrant waters, curling around your fingers and wrists, slipping their sinuous way up your arms and neck, covering your eyes with the softest fluttering of new green leaves. You close your eyes and look with your inner sight. You see flecks of green floating through the transparent sea, algae or plankton, whale-food, and the water glints with viridian growth, plenty and renewal to feed us all, you are swimming in soup. You are an ocean plant, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen, converting your emerald body into food, verdure. You are the slow pace of change at the level of seasonal growth, holly bushes in winter, azaleas in spring, summer-bright kudzu, cool bitter green of pine against the black of late fall.
You slide further into the depths, your green body darkening and shifting into blue, deep cloudy blue spruce, slate sky of winter twilight, declinating backwards in time to a pale winter afternoon aquamarine, azure-grey autumnal waves, tangy blue taste of sour blueberries in summer, aventurine blue of glacial waters in spring, kyanite and cobalt rocks tumbling downstream, revealing the silver beneath. Iridescent silver-blue of new snakeskin rippling under your fingers as the eternal snake coils around your waist and bites your hip. Blue poison surges through your veins, a cold burn of knowledge. Alert, alert!, your body says, but your mind cannot respond, your mind is awash in lapis waves, gently buoyed by the un-sensation of paralysis, calmly you drift down into violet seas.
A loamy sea rich with the last light of the sun, sprinkled with glowing amethyst jellyfish, floating as you are along the currents, no will to move in any direction except the one chosen by the ocean. Lavender blooming, lilac, blooms blown, past their time, fading and falling into the ocean depths, eggplant currents tug your passive body ever deeper, purple-grey sharks swim past you, bumping your body with their sleek skin and blunt noses, the lights of the jellyfish are extinguished one by one as the purple fades into night-black waves.
No sound, no sight, no touch, the black water is the same temperature as your blood, still coursing, ever more slowly, through your veins. Your craving for connection consumes you, and you fade into it, fade into the ebony waves that connect you to the beginning of all things, the ocean where the first cells began life’s first adventure. The source. The obsidian depths cherish you, remind you where you came from, before you were you, when you were not even plankton or greenbeans or the topaz eyes of a predatory cat, when you were everything. You are the hour before dawn, the heart of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the seedpod of a monkeynut tree, a forest after the fire has had its way with you.
The blackened lava of your body fills the ocean, wave upon wave, until one day it is no longer black. It is charcoal, and time passes, and then it is a rush of dove-grey wings, rain on upturned faces, the mists of Ireland, the obscured light of an overcast day revealing a clutch of ostrich eggs, the bleached linen of communion dresses and ruffled ankle socks, the puffy clouds clearing, the bright white light of a new day.