She knew not how long she had been floating, neither a guess of seconds or minutes to be made. It could have been for a moment or for eternity. The spanning sky of sunset colours blanketed anything else not of the ocean. Or was it a sunrise? She couldn’t remember having slept but perhaps she wasn’t awake to begin with?

She rolls her head in the water, looking to each side but there’s nothing save for the horizon and the sunrise/sunset.

‘I don’t feel wet,’ she murmurs to herself. Her voice disrupts the flow of the water around her, and the clouds seem to shift, causing her to realise she wasn’t sure if anything had been moving in the first place.

She raises a hand and water trickles off of it, but it doesn’t share space with her. Instead, it’s like there a warm sealed layer between her and the water. She feels the gentleness of free-moving water and yet it doesn’t seem to permeate into her hair or clothes. She remains dry.

‘The first question to ask is … “am I dead?”,’ she continues, ‘and the next is “is this a dream?”.’

She lets her hand fall back into the ocean and it splashes. The world starts to darken and her mind fills with distortions of all that might be beneath her if she is alive. She remains still, continuing to float on the surface and refusing to lower her legs into the water to get a better view of her surroundings.

‘There are more monsters on land than in the sea,’ she whispers to herself. ‘At least in the water, I will only be eaten out of necessity.’

She tries to think of her life before existing on the ocean but there seems to be nothing there. She knows vaguely of the creatures below her and yet cannot remember the context within which she learned of them. She thinks on the questions she posed but cannot remember if she ever lived to be able to die, and if she ever slept to have ever dreamed.

‘Do I exist?’ She opens her mouth to let the thoughts pour, hoping that it means she at least exists in this moment. ‘Have I ever existed? Am I about to exist?’ Not even the wind answers her questions. ‘Is this the basin of reincarnation? … Like a womb of some sort? Is Styx not a river but an ocean? Styx? A river … smaller than an ocean.’

As her attempts to keep her words pouring begin to circle, always coming back to speculations about where and why, and eventually she runs tired of asking the same thing over and over and she falls silent.

The sun still hasn’t set but continues to look as if it is about to. She blinks, waving her hand in the water as she stares at the drifting pools of colour. She closes her eyes and hums, a small melody vibrating through her, held together by threads of memories.

When she next opens her eyes, the sun has set, but it has not hidden away below the horizon but has merged with the ocean. Streams of the beautiful pastels swirl around her as the borders between cloud and water meld together like melting candles.

She continues to hum as her world becomes truly nothing but ripples of colour. Again she closes her eyes, knowing that, no matter where she reopens them, she will be content to gaze upon the beauty of the world.