Metaphor

 In the afterglow your smile fades like a loon on the dive, blocked from the surface of a more pleasant kingdom full of airy heights and strange beings who walk on two legs.  Down in the darkness you search for something you can't find, only the vague trace of something more, something better, something different from the things that led you here.  It could solve all your problems, transport you to a new world, a place where you are the center of the universe and all your dreams come true.  East coast, west coast, the water is thick wherever you swim.  Here there are no beginnings; all direction in life surrenders to the natural currents moving through the void, naked to the eye, as powerful as fate, as unpredictable as vortices on the poles of planets.  Look up, the sun is far away, that world you left cannot be seen.  All that's left of it are fragmented memories as you drift through the water, slowly losing consciousness yet feeling some source of truth can be reached in all this uncertainty. 

A glimmer can be seen at the bottom of the sea.  What you sought is suddenly found.  It's the most alluring thing you've ever seen.  You swim as hard as you can to reach it, but you can't.  It doesn't occur to you that it's only the darkness surrounding it that enhances its image, or that it's some artificial symbol of the true light you miss, that supremely radiant source of energy circling the dome in the atmosphere when you were on land.  You try as hard as you can to reach it, but it feels like you're getting nowhere.  The light is getting bigger, but you're drifting farther away from it.  The harder you try, the bigger it gets and the more you are repelled.  All the effort leaves you exhausted, despairing of the journey, wanting to quit and waiting for the water to swallow your soul, drowning you the death you deserve after wasting all that time trying to get something that wasn't yours.  

Upon the aquatic plumes of desperation, you finally stop trying.  You are suspended in the awful cavity, where the natural course of things is putting them in perspective for you.  You don't sink to the bottom like you should; instead, the water takes you back up toward the real light, floating on a carapace to the place where you belong, where the life you'd abandoned welcomes you back with waves of remembrance.  But the idealized light is what you desire most.  There's nothing for you in the real world, only imperialism, greed and envy, commercial publishing, consumer indices, terminals locked in mutual permanence, time trapped in a variability matrix, numbers disseminated amongst the skyscrapers, expelled from all that is untamed, oddly trapped in artificiality itself.  And then it occurs to you that the unattainable is just as imaginary as the mundane; all that separates them is the ability to dream, and so dream you will, dream prolifically as you swirl about the whirlwind that takes hold of you, gyrating you through the twists and turns of societal numbness, painting the illusion that you're getting closer to the light at the bottom without ever quite reaching it.