I was on a rock on top of the ocean. Or perhaps I was in it, facing it, letting it pass through my shivering limbs. All I could see for eons was the blended milkshake ocean-sky. I tightened my grip on the umbrella’s cool handle, now warmed by my own pulse. I was close under the shelter with someone, perhaps a mother or friend or lover, someone who engendered my self-worth. Drops ossified atop our heads, demanding entrance to the small waterproof bubble we had made. I squinted to see the islands and ships were masked by a solid, foggy surface, molten around the edges, like a large slab of aerogel. The horizon’s low-pressure system chicanery, so rarely experienced on the yellow shorelines.

I had slept well the preceding night. There was no rain, but refulgent moonlight; almost violent when I held the curtain between two fingers, allowing a slight gap of whiteness to pale my face. They laid nearby, throat-snoring sedately. Perhaps they were someone perfectly attuned to my subconsciousness, and we dreamed the same dreams, living in them together like some Jungian fantasy. Perhaps the apartment was north-facing, books and papers circumambient. We were academics. Bottles and glass tumblers glistened atop the coffee table where the umpteenth beverage was ingested. Where I performed acts of psychological dissonance and pageantry; perhaps out of genuine hippocampal conflict, perhaps I was all-knowing yet all-denying. In this way, psychological pathetic fallacy was cast upon the coastal area, the skies murky and hidden behind pockmarks of vaporous cloud. In the home we made, the air was always nostalgic and sweet like freshly spilt birthday party soda on a colourful rug. There were no more tiny, hollowed out spheres in aluminium panes, once containing transcendentalism, courage, la petite mort. Prescriptions were filled and had not been renewed; moribund pills lay defunct within cabinets. Our wavelengths were cured with hyper-contentment and eternal return. We were vibrating on higher frequencies, like the foggy ocean-sky, reaching new dimensions without organ failures. And walking on crystallised rain drops. And the velvety blue of the clotted sky. And never wondering what we could have seen and done, because we had seen and done it already, and with Frangelico in our collective oesophagus, too.

I melted onto the pillow, après-sunlight, and was submerged in somnolent waves. My subconscious was vast, filled with intensive properties reaching climaxes. Much like the embryo developing limbs and organs, I also reached phase transitions, triggering degrees of reflection, discoverability, apnea. The dream followed branching nodes into warped funhouse mirror timelines. The palm trees outside were restless in the midnight wind. They were morphogenetic. They could become longer and darker, or shorter and greener. Not with imposition, not from a divine force, but only from the flows of mass, water, oxygen, hair, amniotic fluid, UV rays, etcetera. I wanted to be like this. Flexible. Back bare on the gentle currents of the salty sea, my mind would accept the intensities and flows of objects, morphing into desires and realisations.

Our ears pounded as rainwater seeped into flimsy sneaker shoes and old socks. The shorelines were becoming hazier by the millisecond. The furniture on the balcony of our humble brick and mortar apartment was curiously dry. Although still pouring seemingly ceaselessly, the balcony provided comfortable shelter; and a rain lover’s closeness to the sensations of the phenomenon. It had created pools against the tiles, where my ever-shifting reflection glimmered dully against the sky. I felt as though my organs were held inside rain drops. I breathed in the rain’s salty vapours, brought up from the ocean below. Beads of water frolicked atop my ankles. Gushing water, unabated and intense; contrasted water drops which fell into plinking pools. Before me was a raging tropical storm, another rainy day, a mystique of fog and grey, an endlessly morphing shoreline.