shib·bo·leth

1

He plunges beyond the dark blue jello - synthetic teeth swallow him whole - beyond decaying pieces of coral as white as a fluorescent bulb - past green fish struggling to find food - plunging himself deeper into a dark hole. Sinking into the belly of our earth - fear of the unknown - regret of his pursuit but an inability to turn back now, committed. Feelings of satisfaction - the freedom to search and to be able to swim into the abyss. But becoming lost in oneself can draw oxygen out of the body. 

Translucent fish with a soft magenta fin draw him into a trance. He stops swimming and begins focusing on holding his breath. Letting go of the pursuit of what is at the other end of this trench - he allows the ocean to deliver him to where the collective conscious believes he must end up - fate in the hands of an outside entity is here, larger than any individual. 

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2

A sea turtle takes in a breath and lets out air bubbles into a vast ocean. It watches them rise a few fin-lengths in the air and vanish. 

A neighborhood regular takes a seat at the counter of a tin bartop. He looks around and sees all familiar faces, as well as an unfamiliar white man seated inwardly on a sagging woven seat. Seagulls fly and shit and drinks are drunk on remote sand ashore a cenote. 

“Is the reason my trouble exists because I can never speak the language?” our unfamiliar face, Sinclair, speaks. 

“What are you talking about?” the local says. 

In the dirt parking lot an armadillo rolls up into a ball, afraid. 

“I’m finally drunk enough to try to talk - I assumed nobody in the bar spoke english”.  

“Well, I speak english. And a little French too. From my grandfather's time fighting in the World War 2”. 

“A Mexican fighting in World War 2?” Sinclair speaks into his beer.

“Didn’t know that, huh? Well, he didn't speak any of them very well. Not even Spanish. He was what you can call a lost man. He would often begin speaking French in the middle of a conversation with Americans, or Spanish with a group of Germans.”.

“You think he was still able to get his point across?” Sinclair asked innocently. 

“If I told you in French that humans never listen, would you understand me?”, a lizard itches in the breeze, “What are you doin out here anyway?”

“If I’m bein’ honest, I'm trying to find myself. With a little bit of diving to pass the time”. 

The local man begins twisting around in his bar stool like an owl, glancing upon the faces of all 3 men and a singular baby in the bar - then twisting back he looks Sinclair straight in his eyes and says, “Well… I don't think you're any of them three men over there - you could be that baby though”. 

The white man lets out a slow laugh that emanates a gasp of air, “You never felt such a way before?”

“Such a way? You are feeling alive, that's what that is” he separates his thought with a sip of beer, “humanity wasn't meant to be so hard, just naturally cruel, as we perceive it. Your mind is playing tricks on you. You know who you are, you are everything and nothing.”

“Everything and nothing?” Sinclair looks up childishly. 

“Once you realize you are everything as much as you are nothing at all, that weight can be lifted off of your shoulders” a skeleton falls apart in sand.

The energy spins in the bar - as if the air is beginning to leave the room. Words that rise like bubbles, unheard.

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3

The sky was blue and Henry’s socks were the color of mowed grass - one foot firm on the ground - that day he had nothing to do and decided to begin playing around on his old electric piano. At the time, all I think he was doin’ for a source of income was painting parking lots. 

He had purchased that electric piano to mess around with once in a while, going through periods of interest, as well all do. He wanted to start teaching himself the Doors and Jim Croce - he used the piano as a vessel to transport himself from current household conditions: fur on carpet and candle wick below wax and full ashtray and clothes on floor and lazy words on the walls - to nostalgic tempos that allowed him to be Ray Manzarek as his brain memorized just the accurate finger placements on the piano. Over and over again he would practice memorizing Riders of the Storm and Light My Fire - one day someone suggested he write something myself. Well, I don't think he had ever thought of such a thing. 

Henry was living in Colorado at the time - the sound spilling out from his piano would head up a few thousand feet toward our continent's great divide. On the way back down it would lose all hope, meaning, passion - and turn into an uncharged defibrillator aimed at the heart. 

He’d sit down at the public pianos around town to play and someone would walk by and ask who he was playing.

“Me!” Henry would reply excitedly.

“It couldn't have been! That didn't sound like you.”

He soon got to thinking, what does sound like me?

Henry moved away from playing other musicians' music and began playing his own and noticed a change. He felt as though he still sounded like all of his influences, culminating into a replicated wax figure - looking into the mirror he described what he saw as Ray Manzarek and Jim Croce staring back at him. He struggled deeply with trying to develop a sound that was authentically his. To get there, he felt as though he had to take a dive into himself. Further experimentation with various artists - different ways of thinking about and listening to music. 

Well, he began experimenting alright. Tried different tunes, genres, bars and beers, hotels and tumbleweeds, oncoming bright lights and outgoing silence. He tried listening more, he tried playing more, taking advice and thinking everyone didn't know what they were talking about. He began to doubt if one can define their true authentic self - how can one find their sound?

“Yeah the reason he sounds so good is because he’s young and high” a man said from the crowd. 

While this whole internal self-inflicted mess was occurring, love droned in and out of his life like a note off beat. No relationships were all that important to him. He lived to get to the bottom of that authenticity that he felt was just around the internal corner on Cerebellum Street and Hippocampus Lane. Well it just so happens that the 12th and final relationship this man was engaged in came in his 53rd Winter on this planet - and it just so happened to be with me. 

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I would sit across from Henry who would strike these beautiful ivory chords in harmonic order that seemed to have burst out of thin air - really inspired stuff. I would watch him and always try to get him to look at me so he could see how amazed I was - I had that look in my eye. He would never meet my gaze - glazed eyes and glass fingers would then liken himself, a firefly to a cigarette - ignited but producing a different buzz. “Pretty nice, huh?” He would look over smugly knowing how well he was playing. But he was always so frustrated. 

He reflected too deeply into himself and without outside approval from anyone else, or those he admired, he never really knew the talent that he had, and he always underplayed his ability to play uniquely like himself. He never knew if you can define yourself, he was always taught definitions by those around him - how do you know if you are something, right?

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I went to my husband's, well, dead husband's favorite band's concert recently. I hate them. But I went to record it for him and play it at his grave. I don't ever want him to stop following his music. 

I try now to tell myself that we are in everything as much as we are influenced by everything. The world is as much of a product as I am a product of this world. Gets to become hard believing these things - investment in individuality - a false peak - another step: another moment pops up, it changes you - but do you ever really change? Are you always the same, are you always you?

4

Unconscious, like a fish out of water. Bubbles sink in pressurized water unable to escape to a surface where one can safely burst, returning air to our atmosphere.

"If you look within yourself too much, you will lose yourself. Find your depth at which you can sustainably dive. Don't let who you are and what you love destroy you. Find your depth, and learn from it. All the aquatic animals that occupy it, the amount of light that is granted passage to such depths” the words sounded caught on the local man's cheek as he sat at the tin bar -  like a hook in a fish's mouth.

“So in order to be one's true self, you can't think about who you are?” the man said drunkenly as words poured out of his mouth like stoned candle wax.

“Find the sweet spot. Where you can go on living happy and carefree. Where you are self reflective to a point of intentional improvement, but without driving yourself crazy as you micromanage your own journey to what you believe success looks like.”

“How did you do it?” the man drunkenly asks, innocently. 

“I kept diving. And I kept getting it wrong. Until I dove so much I couldn't differentiate who I was, at 30 meters from 90 meters. It was all the same nothingness - serenity.”