I have no eyes, yet I feel warmth—gentle and insistent.
Pressure gathers around me, coaxing, urging me forward.
Toward what, I cannot say.
There is no what.
Only sensation: warmth, pressure, movement.

And now—I move.
Not toward anything. There is no toward.
Only the realization that movement is possible.
That I have edges, discovered by contrast—
one side kissed by warmth, the other swallowed by chill.

Cold is death.
Something unspoken within me knows this.
And just like that, I understand direction.

I don’t know what I am.
I don’t even know that being is a thing.
But as the current takes hold of me,
some primal murmur rises from the deep:
I am.

It startles me, that flicker of being.
A shimmer of awareness.
A single glowing truth in a sea of not-yet.
I exist. Somehow. For something.
Though I can’t say why, or for how long.
But in this moment, I understand my purpose:
to continue.

I reach—
not with limbs or logic,
but with the sheer will of being.
Reaching is all there is.

Some currents bring nourishment. Others, harm.
I can’t tell which is which until they pass.
Death, when it comes, is not a mystery.
It is a reminder.
A soft folding back into the truth:

Even in dying, I remain.

And then again, movement.
But this time, it’s different.
Deeper. Wiser.
Stripped of agony.

Living accrues a manifest of exhausting proportions.
But in this new drift, I feel a pulsing cradle.
I remember the beginning.
The infinite exhale of existence.

The river that death cannot dam
but which is forked and curved to its liking
until I remember my name
and that I am the tourist, the boat, the river, and death.

After a life of darkness and cold,
I rest.
Living has worn me thin.
But I have lived.

It is enough.
At least, for now.

After so much time,
so many attempts at life,
there, at the bottom of the ocean,
in the darkest of the dark,
My first life began.