Invertebrate

Spread out like a starfish, the sense of spine is gone; all I am is centred in the gut-responses. Warmth and light turn around me. I am as much a creature of the atmospheric sea as the starfish is of the ocean. I lie in the sun, and the star lies in me.

I am aware of my mindfulness, and if I am invertebrate, it is octopoid in its curious playfulness. Head-foot, soft-shell, beaky, beady, not a sucker but mostly suckers — that is what I feel. Oddly alien, a cling-on, almost a barnacle.

What need is there for bone and spleen? I am bloodless but not colourless; I have emotions too, but they are subtle, of the water and not of the flame. I have no fat to store or burn; I have no need for bile.

Oh, the horror of it all, as I surface from the deep! The dreaming sea parts and departs, my consciousness rises into the dryness of the air, the heat and pressure of the airy world.

It is terrible to wake and find oneself merely human.