Ascension

        It is quite simple to remain in floating equilibrium all morning. You find that if you engage your fins every four and a half seconds, you continue to flow with the undetectable yet ever-present current of the bowl. Staring out into a warbled aquamarine bliss with little to no effort. You have it down to a science, an art. You swim.

        You are a fish in a glass bowl and it is a rotten autumn morning. The sky can’t decide whether or not it will burst so instead it sits unchanging, a blotchy array of grey ugly clouds. Toast pops. Butter spreads. Children bustle. Mother rushes them out the door. You swim.

        Clockwise is your preference as it seems to work with the rhythmical beat of the cosmos and besides, who would want to be anti-anything? You swim.

        You glide and wade as the morning slips into a darker, greyer noon. You test how much you can reduce your strokes whilst continuing operation. How microscopic and singular you can become. How imperceptible. Your heart beat slows. Fins barely flick the water. You are suspended. Vision blurs at the edges. Completely blank. You swim. 

        Delirium is a state you are quite used to, even fond of. The numbing that occurs when all of your attention is beamed at the one recurring action of pushing water is a delightful dizziness. Up cannot be told from down. A faint ringing blossoms in your ears. The way that you circle the tank is rarefied, even sacred. You have spent what you can only assume to be years creating a directional flow and you follow its path like a monk carving out a zen garden. You are devout to this stream. This celestial path, infinite and unending, ceaselessly guiding you.

        The kitchen door smacks open and the sound is like a gunshot. If you were not steeped in a trance-like sedation the noise alone could have caused you to go belly-up. But it scarcely discomposes you. Simply shifts your focus. To the sloping pile of library books Mother has haphazardly plonked beside your bowl.

        A self help book lays with its cover flashing up at the ceiling. Beneath a nondescript title, that could be a 10 Steps! or Discipline 101 or Chasing Success: The Real Happiness? a golden hand reaches up towards you. The book is one of those strange artefacts you only ever see in airports or petrol stations in country towns and the hand is printed like a lenticular card where shifting the object in your palm reveals an image in motion. A three dimensional trick of the eye. The hand conducts a beckoning gesture as you ride the current, inviting you down into some implied ethereal explosion of knowledge. Come now, it suggests. There’s more to life than just this. You swim. As you run circles round the tank, the hand continues to gesticulate. Your gaze is trained to it. Even when your route leads you to the blindspot behind the acrylic diving helmet, the hand seems to phase through and into your line of sight. You could have watched it for minutes, or it may have been hours. More than this? You swim.

        You try to return to your practice but the hand glints in the corner of your eye. Niggles beneath your scales. It couldn’t be possible. From your understanding, life was about getting on with it. Mother ran the house and cooked the food. The children went to school and played racquetball and put gum in each other’s hair. And you? You swam! But… Why?

        It was a question you supposed you just hadn’t bothered to ask. But you are frustrated that it’s being posed only now. You’ve got it all figured out and now this book wants to play God? No. You know what is best for you. You swim.

        …

                       …

                                     …

        Except now that hand is just there. Perpetually waving in on itself. Welcoming you to new knowledge. Like a fortune teller inviting you to sit in front of her crystal ball. To view the possibilities of the future. And it is annoying, but it can’t be ignored. It won’t let itself be ignored. C’mon little fish. Dream bigger. How could there be more to life than this?

        The situation is troubling in its plainness. For days the cover nags at you. Your circles start to become rapid and panicked. You throw away any notion of stability and pattern. You’re practically darting about the tank, smooth lines traded for odd hexagonal shapes created in the bubble trails of your fins as you ping off the glass.

        You start to neglect what little food you are offered. Dull flakes pool above your head, fluttering down throughout the day and collecting in a layer of mushy algae along the rocks. Your scales lose their orange brilliance going milky pale and sickly as your mind spirals into a whirlpool. This one inviting gesture intended only to prompt a reader to open its covers now seemed to be haunting each lap around your divine sanctuary. Promising there to be more. A more that you are missing.

        Hunger rakes at your ribs. Your brain blitzes and buzzes. If there is more to life than swimming, then what is your purpose in life? What have you been living for? The anguish pelts you around the bowl. You are frantic for answers. But day once more bleeds into night and there is simply nothing to do but watch as the hand cycles through, repeating come-hither endlessly.

        …endlessly.

        Horrified, you swim right up to the glass and press your eyes as close to the book as possible. Amongst the corrugated plastic you catch your own reflection. Rippling on a loop. Trapped.

        And that is when you do not swim. You stop.

        You’re fins slow like a machine cranking to a halt. Incrementally until they are simply adrift. Immobile.

        You close your eyes and inhale. Deep and long and low and it fills all of the parts of you that were aching. Hungry and hollowed out and suppressing a suffocating desperation. You hold that breath. And as if by magic, you rise. 

        You break away from your track and ascend up through the layers of water. You gradually reach the middle of the bowl, where the glass balloons out widest. It is cooler up here. Crystalline and chilly. Like untouched snow. You hold onto that breath some more. And you continue your upwards surge.

        You float like a hot air balloon taking to the sky. The feeling is like the greatest relief you have ever felt in your life mixed with one million birthdays and all of their joy and crashing brilliant emotion. You gaze back at the hand. From this new height it no longer appears to be dragging you down but rather moving in reverse and encouraging you up. Without activating a muscle you glide freely, your transparent fins billowing gentle as a head of golden hair in the wind.

        As you drift up to the top of the bowl, your underside quite naturally and easily rolls to position above your head. You are not afraid. Your discoloured scales leaf off and flit sweetly about the tank. The shedding of the programmed self. The transformation into a new form.

        Your belly breaks the surface of the water and very suddenly and miraculously you are floating above your bowl! Fresh and new and shucked. And glowing. In the dead of this starless autumn night you, a house pet – a gold fish! – bathe the entire kitchen in a dazzling honey lemon light. You hover there. Limbs completely slack and mind racing through a life lived in conformity and monotony but now unexpectedly filled with deep clarity. 

        Of course there was more to life. This ritual itself was proof of it. Unlocking it took only the bravery to detach from the known.

        Suspended like a golden discoball, you feel a rush of immense gratitude. Not everyone works it out before their end. But you have. And in a ravishing shower of radiant stardust,

        You vanish.