Swim

Keeping pace

The eyes flicker down below inside the head while the limbs shake abruptly and in an unsteady rhythm. Winds humming alongside the riverbanks leave the floating existence inside the calm waters untouched. No sudden movement exerts its power above the cover, causing the entity to stay in its numbed, seemingly lifeless position. By time, a little wave pushes the outside shell forward or backward but nothing leads to a change in the substance. Living becomes more like a lifelong detention, a delayed relief rarely renewed and never resetted. The shroud remains intact and protects the inside from being moved or transformed into something else. Keeping the unbelievable pacing of the other existences gets complicated as the time passes on. A safe restraint seems to be the only escape out of the lightspeeded life afforded at the shore and banks the shell leaves behind. Sometimes another entity touches the face, leaving a blurred scheme on the memory, but soon it is lost again to the creature below the shell that is craving for traces of memories and dreams kept by the existences on the shores. Distance divides the entity in the water and the beings assembled around it on the ground. Fear is the last protection offered and the shadow belonging to the old self of the entity provides the last embrace possible for the core that is more and more drifting away from its shell. The creature below licks around the spots, blinding the parts left from the entities eyes. One image, a fantasy imagined long ago, a beloved person lost to the otherworld, bleeds together with another. As the entity finally loses its abilities to see, smell, taste, the demon down under rewards the living dead with the price of floating out of life. Keeping pace seems no longer important, as well as swimming when the freed spirit breaks from the motionless, cold covers. Before the light recovers the empty core to step into a fresh awakened body, the previously encountered beloved person leaves its imprint inside the mind, becoming the lifelong vessel that will finally chain down the spirit again...