I am nothing.

The river was there, and now it is gone without leaving. All around me the features of the world blur and melt together, as if it was a watercolor painting that someone had dumped in the kitchen sink. Color, and lines, and boundaries, and dimensions... sinking, warping, spiralling into a tie-dye collage of definitions that were never given words. Melting, gravity sucking at my feet as they congeal to the jello-ing ground. I don't mind. Nothing can scare me but apathy, and it cannot come to such a place.

I am everything.

A world distorted like the bulbous reflections in Christmas balls dangling from a pine tree. I let go, disperse myself, the whites of my eyes composed of swan wings, or Caribbean sand, or perhaps a newly white-washed fence as it dries against the summer. My rubber existence stretching without losing elasticity. Somewhere, someone is thinking of ice cream and I brush the floating thought as it drifts aimlessly by. My head is a recording studio with the latest equipment. The line to enter stretches back to Time Square, every (e)motionless face pressing mechanically for a time slot inside my head. Someone else's thoughts, scratched against bathroom walls until painted over, as they are every year. Like the window painted black, except for the blurry clearings of "Sean and Aoife" chipped into clearness.

I am boundless.

Steady backstroking through reality that runs clear and smooth against my skin, awash in facts that buoy me up and gently slosh back and forth without rhythm. I lie with the world at my back, wide eyes staring up at an impossibly endless sky that throbs with a life I cannot see. ...flat universe, stretching endlessly and small enough to fit inside a suitcase. Slowly, something emerges from the liquidy mists, and the reconfigured world resolves itself into a universal presence. Something is everything. Rivers, clouds, fax machines, limestone, beer bottles, all melted and cast into a living mold. A face, a breath, a... consciousness. I backstroke, gaze up at the pondering moon, take hold of its wedding train, and steadily tug it down to earth.

I dissolve, and the world as I know it disappears.

The river spills into the sea.