Floating . . . that sense of weightless déjà vu. I have been here before. How long have you been lost? Adrift in this endless deepdark? How long will you drown? I have been . . . here . . . before . . .

The brine fills my mouth with the ease of an old lover, and I don't choke as it slides down my throat. My lungs twitch with the internal unreachable itch of serif scratches. Not all text is equal; some words are persistent, harder to dissolve than the others. I do not choke.

White dark flashes against my eyes, the alphabet fading. I fixate on a phrase, and try to remember its poetry, but Yeats is gone, Wordsworth is gone, Eliot is gone. They're all gone, the brine-soak says, dissolving the bond between the vowels and the consonants. The curves become fluid, and the hard lines melt into a smear of pickled darkness.

There. A flickering bioluminescence . . .

My hat is gone . . .

I drink the brine of dissolved books . . .

Clustered around the table . . .

The Tower is falling . . .

My crown is gone . . .

2385185 1185 251521?. . .

Dad? . . .

Failure is part of your programming . . .

Count the petals . . .

Embrace me, my child . . .

She loves me, she loves me not, she loves . . .

His words become meaningless now . . .

A kaleidoscope of color in my hand. Faster. Faster now, and all that weight is gone. All that guilt drops away, completely and utterly, and I have no fear.

I am free.