The swimmer slowly turned onto her back and gazed skywards.
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How long had she been adrift?
Floating in this gentle world of water and salt haze, she'd lost time.
Her mind, freed from the onerous job of managing her body, had been let loose; whirlpooling through an erratic voyage of tangential thoughts.
In a salty stupor, surrounded by rapidly dissolving thought bubbles, she reached for that last elusive idea before it slipped away to the back of her brain to resurface again when it felt like it. Or not.
She'd watched a show about hypnotism recently. The person, once hypnotised, was able to recall images and details of past experiences that couldn't be accessed by their conscious mind.
The hypnotist extracted memories with seeming ease and the subject described long-shrouded tales of their early life in explicit detail.
The experience overall seemed to be positive and once back to normal consciousness, the person seemed relaxed and happy with the outcome.
She wondered whether the experience was like that familiar sensation of clarity that came to her at the edge of sleep, when memories of forgotten faces crystallised into high-definition images and then dissolved when you strained to capture and hold them.
Tossing in the humidity last night when finally on the precipice of sleep, Stella's face came to her, startling in its clarity.
Awake, she had tried to conjure her daughter's face so often, resulting in frustratingly retrieving the same familiar yet distant memories time and again; youthful features worn indistinct with the passing of time and effort of trying to sustain their sharpness.
Momentarily perfect. Much of life was like that really; sometimes you had to distract yourself or look in another direction to get a clearer picture.
Last week her eye doctor had tried to trick her and distil her focus. Forced to look straight ahead with her chin trapped in its neat little cradle, she stared at the bright light as instructed.
One at a time, he scrutinised her eyes, delving into her brain via her optic nerve.
The bright lights jarred and the photos he took made her wonder what he was trying to see in those fluid filled orbs.
"Is this better or worse than before?" he asked as he flicked through his magic show of changing lenses, and she stared diligently at the eye chart.
She replied, "much the same" and wondered if this was a valid response or more aptly applied to her current life state.
The orange sky cracked through the swimmer's consciousness and pulled her focus back to earth
"Still having ocular migraines?" he asked. "Now and then" she responded. They never lasted long and would sometimes leave her with a slight headache, mildly inconvenient.
She didn't tell him that she found the aura fascinating; the way it pulsated and changed shape.
Even with eyes tightly closed she could still see it and knew this meant it was in her brain, not her vision. This didn't stop her trying to focus on it, a futile exercise.
Try as she might, the flashing band of light moved constantly out of focus until eventually it left of its own accord.
The fragmented colours of the aura reminded her of the kaleidoscope she'd given Stella for her fifth birthday and how entranced her little girl had been with her new toy. "Look mummy, there are rainbows inside!".
Eons ago, on a soft summer night she had peered into a telescope with her wide searching eye.
"Cover your other eye with your hand but don't close the eye" was the instruction.
As she leaned into the lens the rings of Saturn shimmered and bedazzled her one lucky eye, while its less fortunate partner searched futilely in the blurry blackness of her cupped hand, eyelashes brushing softly against her fingers like a trapped moth seeking the light.
She read somewhere that you don't get over grief, you travel through it; it's a journey.
She was sick of hearing about everything being a journey. People were always on a journey, especially doing stupid things on trivial reality shows.
Striving to infuse these banal stories with worth by using poetic descriptions. In her experience, when you have travelled a long way, it's so much harder to reach back and grasp those memories of your lost one.
People say this is a blessing and lessens the feeling of loss and pain that hits you when you are ripped to shreds by grief. She wonders if only people who haven't felt grief yet say this.
She knows she would give anything to relive the moments of intense love that she felt when Stella's arms wrapped themselves around her neck while she giggled and breathlessly insisted on another dolphin ride through the waves.
Cocooned in her swag deep in the desert on a far distant night, she remembered lifting her eyes to the stars and with her peripheral vision, watching the constellation of Pleiades magically materialise into its sisterly configuration.
Like a celestial version of a tiny, perfect lamb chop it shone gently into eternity. But when she stared directly at the Seven Sisters, she couldn't pin them down and stars seemed to shoot off in all directions.
It was like trying to look at the hairlike floaters in your eyes; the more you tried to focus on them the more elusive they became.
The orange sky cracked through the swimmer's consciousness and pulled her focus back to earth.
She rolled over and looked at the shore and thought how close yet how simultaneously infinitely far away it might be.
The baths were visible and if she squinted, she could make out the figures poised on the diving blocks.
But if she looked off to one side, the figures merged with the concrete and became nebulous shadows, inconsequential and transitory.
It was going to be a beautiful evening.
She would sit on the back deck and look at the photo albums after dinner.
When sleep came she would be relaxed and ready.
She looked towards the beach, and stroked forward, steady and focussed.
