Sometimes you have to plunge with the bucket, go down deep to the very end of your rope, past stones which seem to narrow towards blackness, whose moss watches, imperturbable, as you fall.
Sometimes you have to let the slack run out, hope the line will spare you the smack of water.
Sometimes you must accept the smack of water and the rush of it, filling you up to your brim, seeping into the wood and bones of you, making you believe in one panicked moment that it will fill the lungs of you and leave you gasping like a fish out of water watched by implacable moss.
The loss of all things, sense, sight, and what it was you thought you knew of you— you, new, the fish you’ve always been, not falling now but swimming — down becomes up, tunnel becomes a river, and at the end of it, not light, but rather the water you were made for.
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