Weightless

I can’t breathe. This ringing in my ears hasn’t stopped for what feels like hours... days… months. I don’t know if I’m seeing out of my eyes anymore, but the visions of last night are vivid. The crisp morning leaks into the frosted tattoo shop windows.

It feels so wrong to be here before 2pm but this isn’t the first time we’ve spent the night on our stiff leather waiting room couch. It’s easier to stay here than to carry ourselves to our shitty overpriced apartment.

I still can’t breathe. I’ve begun to see blurry shapes in my peripherals, the edge of our coffee table fills my view before I catch my brow on it, trying to right myself from the fall that woke and winded me. I clench my jaw as I finally draw a painful gasp, soaking in a nasty mix of A&D ointment, the leather couch by my face, and oily breakfast food from outside.

My stomach twists. I find myself alone. How many hours did I spend trying to find reality in the night? I get nervous, memories fighting to creep into my safe and familiar existence.

The deadbolt scrapes out of the front door frame and I watch a black steel-toe boot feel it’s way inside followed by a too-loud dull bump of wood hitting a large glass container, the other boot kicks the door back to clear the way for another set of work boots. I brace myself for the inevitable chill of air that will follow as the door shuts.

“We got a saltwater tank,” the voice rises over the ringing in my ears, and I finally look up into the proud face of my husband, Ron. I let half a breath out of my nose and feel the edges of my mouth creep up while the boys set our new tank on the front desk. “Are you hungry?”

Gross. I give a little shrug. It’s so hard to decide on something even when I do have an appetite.

His voice is low as he talks to his apprentice, opening up shop for the day. The baseboard heat kicks on, bringing me back to my current situation on the floor. My pinky bumps something under the couch, kicking the corner out at me, glaring.

The Little Black Book. The night comes rushing back into my head. My heart drops.

All night, I couldn’t figure out the purpose of the book. I bought it from a used bookstore on 52nd street. That quaint little hideaway was my favorite place to exist, among the pages that absorbed sound as if they held a bit of spirit from every life they touched.

The only reason the place is still open is because it’s the face of a very exclusive speakeasy where, disorientingly, you go downstairs and end up on a rooftop. Ok it’s not that crazy. The shop is built on a steep hill, making it very easy to open up one’s basement onto the rooftop patio of a 5 star hotel frequented by the city's finest athletes. Of course, you could take the hotel elevator up, but the bookstore entrance is much more Instagram worthy and dramatic.

But THE BOOK! I had tried to fill that thing with my fashion sketches and tattoo ideas in all sorts of media. I spent hours journaling ultimate truths, feelings, and confessions into it’s creamy pages. I’d even tried to scribe addresses, names, and numbers, grocery lists and scribbles, even my step son’s math homework, but it wouldn’t hold my markings.

That’s why I’m freaking out. I couldn’t leave a mark in it.

It wasn’t like in Harry Potter where the ink sinks back into the pages of Tom Riddle’s diary or anything like that. It doesn’t feel like magic at all… but whenever I would close The Book or leave the room, it was slated clean as if someone had swapped it out for a brand new Little Black Book. The emptiness stared up at me, rejecting my ideas and my essence as if it wanted something different from me.

“Ready?” Ron was putting his coat back on, checking his phone and stepping toward the door. I nodded, peeking at the apprentice’s sketches as I passed him to the door, digging the Little Black Book into my side as I stepped out into the sun. The cold filled the spaces where my leather jacket loosened itself from sticking to my skin. I pull the sleeves down to try and shield the space as I wait for my husband to unlock the Jeep.

Four years of marriage, and we know we will list off a handful of places to eat before settling on the same locally owned farm-to-table spot with too large of a menu. It’s part of the routine, an unspoken ritual to mark the beginning of another day, even though it’s 1pm and we hadn’t changed clothes from our night at the tattoo shop.

I order coffee and pancakes, he orders beer and a burrito, and we settle into the warmth of the booth.

“Did you break in the notebook yet?” He’s eying The Book that I had placed on the table next to the wall. Should I tell him? He might think I’ve gone crazy. I shake my head. “Usually you have half of one of those packed by the time I know you bought another one.” It’s true, I have a whole bookshelf of these exact notebooks filled with musings and memories, motifs and moods.

My mind drifts back to last night. How I dropped it in the stream to see if the pages would wrinkle, when I ripped out half the pages, and when I spilled coffee on it to see if it would stain. What is the deal with this book?

“So what’s the deal?” He’s brought me back to the cafe.

“Sorry,” I say, breaking my voice in for the first time today. I wince at the croak that came out and take a sip of my coffee. “I’m just feeling weird. I can’t stop thinking” I have been thinking a lot.

“...About?” He presses. The Book.

“Like life, reality, identity crisis and all that.” I’m running my thumb along the edges of the Little Black Book wondering if I have gone crazy. It’s an uncomfortable thing not knowing if something so impossible is happening. Maybe it’s a dream, or a dream within a dream, or a parallel universe that quantum theory could interpret, or maybe my brain is dissolving.

“Is it me?” He struggles with identity as well, a result of years of childhood trauma. I shake my head to reassure him that it is just me, hoping he’ll assume I’m having a creative block and that’s why that Little Black Book remains empty. He reaches across the table for my fingers. “We can go for a dive. That always seems to help.” This makes me smile.

Our waitress sets our spoils between us, breaking our conversation. Ron knows that when I get like this, sometimes it’s best to let my mind wander.

There’s something about being underwater that makes time move slow and fast at the same time. It’s a very spiritual place for me and seems to shake up the way I experience life. We’ve been volunteer diving at the aquarium for nearly a year. The aquarium lets us be near our favorite saltwater creatures. Since we left the coast, we can only dive in fresh open water and that’s reserved for the summer months.

Stingrays are my favorite animal. They’re so graceful and strong and I’m a sucker for any kind of stingray symbolism in this world. I have a chemical burn in the shape of a tribal stingray on my thigh from a bad reaction to black henna. It’s the closest thing to a real tattoo that I have. People find it peculiar that I have no real blackwork because I married a tattoo artist. I’m simply terrified of needles or I’d have the back piece that I’ve been designing for nearly a decade, filling an entire one of those notebooks.

Ugh, the Book. I decide to try soaking the pages again, tucking the little black book into my BCD before dropping into the aquarium tank. I want to find my pufferfish friend, Henry, who has such a wonderful personality and seems to hear my thoughts through the water molecules between us.

The Book wants manifestations. I suck a huge breath of air into my regulator, accidentally catching a few droplets of aquarium water into my lung. It burns. I’m coughing up salty phlegm, but looking wildly around the tank trying to see if I can physically see how such a profound thought could come hissing into me from nowhere and everywhere.

My heart is pounding hard. I can feel my blood working as I try to regain neutral buoyancy and avoid crashing into the bottom of the tank. I feel pricking behind my eyes until a bubble of energy grows from my heart and out of my ears as I hear the same hissing thought escape me: MANIFESTATIONS. And I can’t possibly ignore whatever that was.

I surface, rushing my fins off. I’m darting into the equipment room to sit on the floor with my tank and BCD still on. I listened to a couple of podcasts and read a book about manifesting. It always sounded so amazing to find a spiritual unblock in oneself that draws the universe toward your soul needs in life.

I don’t know what to write. I don’t even know what I’m looking for besides simply being okay. I write: Weightless. It flows slowly and boldly from the cheap bank pen that I found by the dive log. Time slows and I immediately feel the air of the universe hug me, contented.

Outside the aquarium, I find myself back into a life where everything and nothing has truly changed. I’m awake. The night has fallen on the city and everything in my vision is crisper and more vivid than ever before. My husband is smoking outside the Jeep with his phone to his ear while I load my gear bag into the back.

Looking out into the lake, I wonder what weighless means. Neutrally buoyant is weightless. Being young and carefree is weightless. Ron’s voice pushes through my thoughts, “We got the PADI grant.” And I’ve truly become weightless.

I laugh a little, then scream, then we are wrapped in a twirling embrace in the parking lot. $15,000 in a grant for us to live aboard a research submarine for three months, creating together, raising awareness and increasing efforts to save the ocean together.

Our time is open to donate our work to the world, to spend with my stepson, teaching him about the reefs.We have funds to send our tattoo apprentice to an art class at the local college while we are away.

Weight has been lifted, freeing me to write articles about our findings on the sub, allowing my husband to expand his underwater photography to publish with my writings. Worry lifted for him to create his marine life sketches to reference for his most popular tattoos. Tedious burdens wiped away for me to start my novel. Freedom to help us create our reality, and our identity.

I sit on the asphalt and open the Little Black Book, knowing it’s different than all the times before where the pages would be untouched as smooth cream.

Weightless. The word is still bold and black as ever. It may have even grown, but now, as if watermarked, all my other writings and notes and scribbles from before are showing through. Faded, like my chemical burn, but still there. Layers upon layers of my desperate markings enhancing the one word that has changed my whole future.

Hissing into the sky as my manifestation message from the tank, I feel the air lift around us. Weightless.