Whale passing through

This illness comes with bad days, where my body feels heavy, like I’ve picked up a ton of bricks, but on the inside.

Is this a bad feeling?

It is not a feeling that allows the actions I want to take.

Not going out, making, working, talking.

Not thinking clearly or forming ideas on a page.

My brain says that this is a scary feeling, that it means things and that those things are bad.

It says “weight” and “danger” and that’s as far as it gets with how it actually feels to feel this sensation.

It’s scary to feel.

So I distract myself. I worry about what the weight means. I worry over what I did wrong. I try to think my way out of it. I think supplement, protocol, trial. Read Stephen King (again). Sleep.

But today I keep looking.

The weight isn’t intrinsically bad.

This is hard to admit. My brain is very vocal on the subject.

"It is very bad! Stop looking at it."

But this is not quite true. This feeling is uncomfortable. It’s useless for doing the work I want to do, and talking to the people I want to talk to.

But how it feels is not bad, not precisely.

It feels…

Like about 100 tonnes of extra weight.

I feel waterlogged, sunken, underwater.

Everything feels simultaneously pressurised, muffled and a bit unreal.

It would not surprise me to see my breath come out in silver bubbles, rushing off sideways. I would not swear that I know which way up I am.

The environment around me feels conditional, thick.

The weight itself…

Has the quality of something in motion.

So slowly that it’s not even clear that it is moving.

Caught only with patience, with repeated glances.

Like sunflowers or an avalanche, what appears initially still is an illusion.

Not that this heaviness is moving through my body. It doesn’t start at my head and move down to my toes.

But the quality of the feeling is the quality of something shifting. A rhythm. A sense of power and momentum.

I’m curious now. I keep studying it.

There’s more.

The sensation has the quality of something moving, but not the movement of falling or growth. Not a natural or catastrophic event. This sensation is in the process of travelling.

This is a full on batshit thought. It occurs to me that I am having crazy thoughts.

I accept that I might be having crazy thoughts.

I pick up the thread of my attention again to see where it goes.

The feeling I have about this weight is the feeling of a stranger. This weight feels personable, intelligent.

It feels like a thing passing through on its way somewhere.

It feels…

I decide to say it.

It feels like the weight of a whale.

The sensation beats its tail.

And something about saying this batshit, crazy thing out loud changes the sensation.

It is still heavy.

I still can’t do things that I want to do.

I am still scared of it.

But it also feels now like a strange and impossible blessing.

Or curse, which is really just a blessing you didn’t ask for.

This curse-blessing: to hold a space for the passage of a whale.

And I’m talking blue here, not humpback or gray. No minor beluga.

This feeling is massive, okay?

It’s a ridiculous weight for me to carry. Laughable.

But I am carrying it.

The impossible fact of me holding this.

A feat that, second by second, demonstrates a fierce magic.

No less impressive than the ocean lightly carrying a creature that is more island than mammal.

And I think, how does that weight sit in the ocean? Is it heavy, does it ache sometimes? Does the ocean long to put the whale down?

And how unconscious the whale is of the burden of itself, moving from here to there, floating like thistledown.

Here to there.

And this moment, me is just a passage between here and there, an “on the way.” A certain way for the water to be, the sky. An instance.

I wonder if this weight senses me, the way that I am sensing it, and thinks anything about how it feels to be here.

Whether I am a moment of cold or lightness, a shiver or a landmark.

I think “I carried you.”

"I am carrying you."

"When you passed this way, I bore the weight of you."

In the absence of choice, it’s difficult to feel joy in this. I would not have chosen to carry this weight.

I wish that this had chosen to swim through someone else’s life today.

But thrust into the moment, the sense memory is not resentment.

It’s sand burns and salt sting, slowly dragging a weight over ground, surf, back into the water. From beached to floating. A kind of helping.

Or catching something heavy as it falls into your raised hands, legs bending, compensating, muscles straining, unsteady. The moment you say “yes, I’ve got you, it’s okay.”

When I come back to this sensation later, it is still heavy, still passing through.

It still feels precious.

Like looking in on something secret, nature revealing a rare moment, not for me but witnessed anyway.

A kind of unlikely honour.

To be the path of a great migration.

A safe way to go.

Unbearable, but I am bearing it. Attending to this vast, benevolent traveller.

An eye the size of a grapefruit, sweet dark glass glitters, curious.

“I see you” looking

And looked at