The suit seals with a soft hiss.

Cold rubber presses gently against my skin,

and already, I feel the shift

the way the world quiets

before a baptism.

I step off the edge.

At first, the sea greets me softly,

warm skin slipping into cooler silk.

It smells like salt and rust,

like shipwrecked years

and something ancient watching beneath.

Light dances across the surface —

fractured gold.

It breaks above me

like glass as I descend to it.

The world goes blue, then dark.

My ears fill with pressure,

a slow crush that hums in my skull,

bones tightening against the deep.

I swallow to equalize it.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Small victories against the weight.

Around me, the silence thickens.

But it’s not true silence —

there’s the electric hush of my oxygen,

the distant clicking of something unseen,

and my own heartbeat —

a metronome of borrowed time.

Deeper now.

The water presses in colder,

slick and hungry.

It tastes metallic over my tongue.

I breathe through the regulator —

rubber, salt, breath, breath, breath —

the rhythm of survival.

Faint lights flicker below,

stitching the dark with their pulse.

Jellyfish drift like silk lanterns.

Something large passes in the corner of my eye,

just a shadow,

but it knows my precence.

My fingers brush the seafloor —

soft silt,

like powdered bone.

It clouds around me,

a slow explosion of memory.

I see my mother’s hands in the kitchen,

coating fish in flour.

I see my brother,

laughing as we swam too deep once,

and didn’t come up for air soon enough.

I taste fear,

the copper of it.

Or maybe it’s wonder.

They’re twins, after all.

My chest tightens — not from panic,

but reverence.

I have gone so far from the surface

that the sun feels like myth.

Here, in this pressure-born cathedral,

I am smaller than breath,

smaller than thought.

And yet,

I feel infinite.

A creature glides past —

eyes wide, lightless.

Neither afraid nor curious.

Just being.

Down here,

that’s enough.

I hover a while longer.

Not because I must.

Because I want to remember

what it means

to fall,

and not fear the falling.

Then slowly,

reluctantly,

I rise.