Unlearning Air
The first thing they noticed was the colour.
It was not the kind that stained objects or soaked into skin, but a living force that wrapped itself around them, bending and refracting with each shift of water. The surface world had trained its eyes to expect light in straight lines and shadows to fall obediently, yet here, under the water, nothing moved as it should. The water carved their faces into shifting masks, casting them in fragments of crimson or emerald or gold.
It was as though the sea had taken them in its palms and was remaking them, line by line, as something both strange and familiar.
They had come from above, in submersible ships forged to hold against the pressure of depths never meant for human lungs. Their engines still hummed far above where they had been abandoned, glowing faintly like lanterns in the distant dark, but now the three had left them, stepping into the currents with bodies not meant to breathe here.
At first, they had choked, fighting against the water that filled their mouths, thrashing as if the ocean meant to drown them. Yet it did not. The salt stung, the weight pressed down like stone, but their lungs, against all reason, opened and accepted it. They were not suffocating. They were changing.
Surrounding them were the remnants of a city scattered across the ground like half-remembered dreams. Marble arches were bent over with coral, the once-tall glass towers were broken but still present, refusing to crumble into nonexistence. Schools of fish drifted through the remains of what once might have been streets, and every shadow seemed to carry the memory of voices. The city was not dead. It whispered. The current carried echoes of laughter, prayers, arguments, all broken and untraceable, but together they clung to the ruins with the weight of history.
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The first of them, eyes bright as frost, drifted through the fragments with something like reverence. Her lips parted, not for words, but in awe at how easily her reflection scattered across the rippling light. She pressed her hand to her face, as if testing whether she still belonged to herself or to the water’s imagination.
The second, with crimson shadows blooming across her skin, tilted her head upwards, as though searching for the sun she could no longer see. The water mirrored every pulse of her doubt, colouring her cheeks with both fire and bruises, recording the war between fear and wonder within her.
The third, calmer, let the blossoms drifting around her hair tangle with bubbles. She met the silence of the city with quiet acceptance, her gaze steady, as though she had known all her life that she would belong here more fully than anywhere above.
But beneath the beauty was unease. Breathing water was not freedom. It was a surrender. Each of them felt it differently, but all knew it — an unspoken contract that the sea would grant them life only so long as they gave something back. Already they sensed their skin cooling, their movements slowing, their thoughts bending with the current instead of resisting it. They wondered how long before they forgot what it felt like to breathe air, to let light fall on their faces without distortion.
The city waited, its arches leading deeper into shadow. Something within it called them, not with words but with a tide that pulled at their bones. Perhaps answers lie ahead, or perhaps only the proof that they were too late to return. Yet as they moved, they realised the water had become a mirror not of their bodies but of themselves.
Each reflection split and swirled, revealing truths they had carried unspoken: longing, vanity, despair, resilience. The ocean gave them back not who they were, but whom they might become if they let it finish remaking them.
They swam forward, strangers and yet not strangers, human and yet not human, feeling the city’s gaze settle upon them. The water did not release them, nor did it hold them captive. It simply breathed with them, a rhythm older than the world above, promising that once one learns to live beneath its surface, the surface itself may never feel like home again.
A Word from the Author
This story isn’t a tale of conquest or escape, but of surrender. It asks what remains of a person when breathing itself is no longer a given, when every reflection is a question, and when the past loosens like silt in a shifting tide.
Created On: 27.09.2025
Published On: 27.09.2025
