Memoirs of an Alaskan

Chapter 13 – Bering Dreams Part 4

This ocean makes me feel old. Makes me feel young. makes me feel small and weak. Very small. Weak. Makes the lines around my eyes deeper. So deep like all this space beneath. Makes me imagine whats down there. The life. The ruin. Twisted hulks of ships and boats and destroyers and Japanese airplanes. Rocks and mud and its all just a mystery and a dream and some other universe entirely.

This ocean makes me dream.

Dreams so deep. Bizarre lengthy dreams about strange amorphous life forms. Alien spores and long forgotten faces. Twisted narratives I can’t recall dredged up from some netherworld of the subconscious or some alternate state of being heretofore unknown to my organic form. Dredged up like all that wreckage beneath me. Down deep. Deeper than I can know or understand. Down deep where no light reaches. Cold and dark and alien and unsurvivable and unknowable.

This ocean makes me understand. That there is nothing to understand. Nothing that can be known. I float. Beneath the sky the heavy sky the dark sky. The wind. The sun. Beams through and vanishes. Crimson and golden and no color at all and also every color that ever was all at once. Shining through and glaring and cynical like some unnamed alien god. Some divine cosmic indifferent intelligence with motives and schemes so profound and complex I can never comprehend. I float. Above. Above I know not what. I sleep. I dive. I dream.

Of what I know not.

Black forms rolling. Smooth black forms. Spraying. Whales all around. Rising and spouting and sliding down again. Down into their universe. Their world. The waves and the oceans surface are the barrier. The edge. Some strange chaotic declination between dimensions. Black shapeless forms. Hard and soft and smooth. Wet and glistening and rolling. Only a glimpse of what is. Only a whisper or a hint. Gone in a blink. Like these dreams when I wake. Like these ideas of what is or what has been or what may very well be.

And we float. Here on this ocean this barrier this edge. This chaotic shapeless border between worlds we float. Above the stars and the rocks and the sun.

Until we sink. Until we both sink. Into their world. Into sleep. Into some darkness unknown.

We sink. We both sink. We become part of everything. Everything thats down there. Everything that ever was. Or ever will be. Like we always were. Always have been. We remember. We sink. We rise again. Maybe.

This ocean makes me feel old and makes me feel young and these lines grow deeper. Deeper than I can know. Than I can ever know.