The Allure of Lights Submerged from View

A woman walked below the murky waters of the pier. I could hardly see her through the waves – such a deep green that they were almost black in the night – as they slapped furiously against the supports that kept me from those depths. The angry surge shook my ground of rotting wood, but I hardly blinked, my feet fixed like roots as if my whole being began, grew, and proceeded here. For I hardly noticed anything beyond that woman, who walked at beneath the murky waters of the pier, as if it was the air that I then remained static in.

I did not notice the trembling dock, for it trembled so violently in my focus that it seemed still. I did not notice the crash and howl of the lonely place, though it poured into my ears until it became a silence. And through that silence all that separated me from the woman beneath the waves suddenly disappeared. Whether she was a being of light, I was not to say. All I was capable of absorbing was the soft green glow that broke the shifting surface, like upside-down sunlight that charmed my features, paling in its brilliance. So totally enchanted was I that if thought could be soft, I thought with my library-voice, for above all I desperately hoped to not startle the woman. My quiet thought wrapped around her, as she walked to and fro in my stuttering vision (the choppy interruptions of the peevish waves made her pacing look like Claymation to me, or dancing in a strobe-lit room); I wondered if she glowed green, or white that reached my eyes through the velvet deep to seem green. My mind, hushing its own curiosity with the self-deprecating duality of people who muse but condemn the idleness of musing.

I did not wonder the sensible questions – could she breathe? Am I hallucinating? Am I witnessing a miracle? – for sensibility bid me adieu as that first nautical ray of green greeted my dejected eyes. With gusting wind and hailing rain whipping me towards the light and weaning that spectre of my sense who entreated escape, I came to the edge of the pier until the woman was visible to me only if I pressed my chin against my chest. Her light, green or white (impossible to know) now bathed my body, casting a nightmarish silhouette into the moonless immensity that captivated poets and writers who had nothing else to do but stare. I understood that, then. There was nothing to do, in the presence of that ambiguous light, but stare. And despite the fiendish weather, it was good.

Recall the shuddering of the pier beneath my feet. It now seemed to me that the old planks had become so soft and pliable from Neptune’s constant abuse, that the wind lifted and shook the pier into a curve like the arch of an intolerant cat’s spine. Like the waves beneath me, the pier rose and fell in crests and crashing troughs, as if the wind was removing wrinkles from its bed and shaking the pier as its doona cover. This rigorous movement with me, thought-laden and despondent on the edge, I launched skyward like a child on a seesaw with a too-heavy-counterweight. I was the only bird silly enough to take flight that night, but I was spectacular in that green light, and I fancy that woman smiled at me from below. I fancy that her green light was magnetic and pulled me from my flight with parabolic perfection, to be whelmed entirely by the furious tide.

It wasn’t until I was engulfed by the deepness of the waves – a leviathan that rivalled the very night’s expanse – that it became clear to my presumptive heart, that nature rarely expresses herself in anger. The growl and surge and violence were vibrant and laughing; the to and fro of the waves was the to and fro of the waltz. And where could this rhythm be borne from but the to and fro of the woman? She still paced calmly across the ocean bed. I am restless recalling her, as I dive into these memories the way I dove into her Queendom.

The sea was alive with her green light.

I fell like the rain to my knees, finding that the water resisted me little more than did the air above. The shuttering darkness that made a Claymation of the woman’s walk also hid from me the colours within the colour that seemed to rise like steam from this below that overwhelmed me. I knelt in the woman’s path, and she lifted me to my feet with a surety that the ocean seemed to believe; and her eyes were green. Her impassive face, painted with the slightest of smiles, a minuscule upturn of her lips, beckoned the questions of my heart into the open water; and I no longer thought quiet, hushed thoughts.

‘Is the absence of colour absent of tormenting feeling?’

Those words drifted out from my mouth as if tugged by a string, and they were black and harsh. They were arrogant words, a trapping question. Those words, the woman of the ocean considered them with an unblinking gaze. And then the blackness drained into the white of dead coral and were bathed in her green light. My question, suspended in the water, dissolved in her green light.

I felt more than I saw. That strange quality of sense, like an internal barometer sensitive of the abnormal; it stripped me of physical limits. Her green light made me forget that I began at me feet and ended at my head; and I burst forth through my own fingertips. Freed, I waltzed with the woman, and we became the current, the push and pull of the tide, the to and fro of the waves.

I was alive with her green light.