Different feels like a freezing cold ocean

Different feels like a sea that you’ve been bobbing in, sinking in treading water

Where they say from their ships, “nothing is wrong with you! Just swim!”

A lifetime of trying to build a raft

semi-drowning

Until one day- an iridescent shimmer comes into focus

Was it always there?
Is it even there now?

And you touch the thick, cool, surface

the shock surprises you, it lights up your limbs

This glimmering ice is where you can finally BREATHE and the air feels cold and new and full of fizzy sparks

But just as you’re starting to see small dances of light on the water’s surface

You notice there is no noise from the ships, they’re just pinpricks of a glow, floating farther and farther

And the cold sea becomes quiet, it’s canyon of inks and shadows

There, the tendrils will press towards your make-shift home, harrowing tentacles that whisper and grab and entangle

But underneath your frozen feet a life has begun to move as well – A spotlight of comets, a blinking of stars,
a kaleidoscope of colours
never seen
above
the surface

The spread moves under the Hull – a fizz, a glimmer, a glow-in-the-dark moat

And you, you begin to move with the tiny glowing bubbles, to dance, as small sparks fizz off your fingertips and toes

The colours underneath join your movements, they twirl and bow and leap as fire across the water, showing faces never seen

A harmony of neon, branches from the smallest tree

And you float, and you dance, and you outline the inky-black surroundings with your movements

But still the tendrils continue to follow, their voices shudder and pull, they snap and swirl, around and around your little home – a current, a vortex

Their whispers become louder as the cold sea forms it’s whirlpool, snake-like shadows, gnash and foam and pull and pull to try and bring you under the water’s surface

down to the absence of light, down to what crawls and slithers and hides, down to where the void fills your lungs and your veins until you are too numb, too full and heavy to lift your head, too tired to continue

But your ice-made-raft stays upright, a shakiness over a shimmer of colours

Your ice-home bobs and dips, just out of reach from the hazy vines

Maybe they will reach you one day, but you will move your feet across the lights, you will create fireworks in the interim

And this moat built on a galaxy of stars, a glimmer that shrinks and expands, that flutters and fizzes, it helps you see the new ice-formed freckles, the never-before-seen crystals that grow as horns, the sparkling designs growing across your limbs

Here, you become anew, something you never imagined, a creature of whimsy, an endless adventure

And you float on this island of magic, this snowglobe of sparks, a mythological home that is
too far, too different,
too fantasy-full,
For those stale wooden ships
to see