Interplanetary: Neptune {9/9}

Deeper than deep. Then deeper still. An atmosphere so deeply blue it's black. A black so wholly wild and unexplored it has no name. Eyes wide shut in the primordial abyss.

The silence cannons and time breaks apart. An ammonia ocean leaks from its cracks, and I dive for diamond crystals on the ocean floor. I swallow them whole for safe-keeping, only to skip them along bands of clouds, watching the dance of divots as day bleeds into night. I ride the carousel of rings with moonrock in my eyes, and swing from a circumstellar belt while counting trojans. I've lingered indefinitely here, where the future meets the past, submerged in a cabalistic world.

And so I am neither ready nor resistant when the drift begins.

The movement is unfamiliar, one I've never known. Am I floating or swimming, flying or drowning? It's impossible to tell. I hold my arms out as stars rush by — I've always wanted to touch one. I pick up speed and it becomes hard to breathe, if that's even what I've been doing. I hurtle blindly and feel as if I'm ripping apart, or coming together. The light is so bright that I surrender to it, and think that dying is more beautiful than I possibly could have known. And then comes the blow that smashes the universe:

Impact.

Disoriented but conscious. On hands and knees. Fingers and toes hooked in subatomic muck. Pull. Push. Hair glued to cheek and every tendon taut. Fragile but defiant. Heave, then inhale, and let the sound fly. Listen... That's my voice ricocheting through space. Those are my atoms coalescing into form. That is the music of the spheres singing in my bones.

I rise.

Soundtrack: Austra, “Utopia”