Chrysalis [ 09. Amnion ]

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It was all darkness.

But it wasn't unsettling. Sometimes, blinding brightness can keep us in the dark -- like when the stars can't be seen for the sun -- similarly, darkness sometimes illuminates.

In the far off, I thought I heard  gentle sounds of water burbling, like when you are underwater. Maybe I was. But I knew I wasn't, because somehow, I wasn't suffocating. Also, there was no water around, or, I couldn't feel it. It was like waving about in empty space. Yet somehow the darkness itself had resistance, giving that wrap-around, warm feeling. Velvety darkness.

I tried to move about, but there was no up or down, no left or right. I was a suspended point in space.

I remembered one time I had sneaked in late at night to a nearby pool. I didn't swim; I just waded through the water to the middle and flailed about so that I floated on my back. I stared at the sky, at the black cloud curtains behind which the moon and the stars had shied away. 

It felt great to be suspended by the water below. When I try to look at the sky while standing up, I feel so overwhelmed  and along comes the spell of dizziness that makes me feel like toppling over. If I lie on my back and look up, I would feel vulnerable, as if the vastness of the sky itself will come crushing down and hammer me to the ground at any moment. Floating on water, I was able to take in the greatness of sky: sans the dizziness, sans the vulnerableness. To contain that infinite stretch into the finite frame of my mind.

It is reassuring to feel water resistance. In the dark, there were none of those fascinating dynamic brilliance of the silvery liquid the water has turned into during a sunny day. There were no ripples of light moving lazily along the bottom of the pool, like a huge net made up of strands of light has been cast, like a graceful, giant, transparent jellyfish. Yet you can feel it: the smooth friction as it slides along your skin and slips away between your fingers, the chill as it evaporates and leaves your body carrying your body heat away, the heaviness when you shove it around, the buoyancy on your back, the urge to dance.

That was the feeling of this liquid darkness surrounding me. 

If this were a dream, maybe I should wake up; if this were illusion, maybe I should seek the reality; if this were death, maybe I should be reborn. It's just,

What if I got those all wrong? That this is actually awake; that this is reality; that this is life?
I felt like Zhuangzi's butterfly, flapping about between two realms, not even sure whether I should be flapping, or even whether I was a butterfly to begin with.