“I feel like I’m in a dream, I’m in some crazy dream, boy. I feel like I’ve made a movie with my baby, with my baby. We were, we were riding through the mountains. Then we found some rocks, and then you told me, ‘look closer baby. You’re a diamond. You’re a diamond, just like this rock could be.’
“You’re a diamond to me.” (11/18/07, Melbourne, Fl.)
Surrender. Then start your engines. Have we all got the bends? Am I really sinking this low?
We’re past her deal with the devil now. She knows just what she gave up to get here. And she knows that this is madness.
When she couldn’t sustain the spark she retreated to the opposite element: she tried to hold the entire sea inside herself. If the sea is in her and she is in the sea there’s no pressure – it’s easy to be an underwater thing. She will grow her own fins and dance the Sufis alone.
Underneath the waves she has discovered her first mistake: you cannot live alone within a single element. She tried to embody Pele, but no woman can be aflame all the time. And now she wants to live in the deep, just liquid diamonds of light trickling in from the faraway surface to remind her of solid ground.
But she cannot be that mermaid she once imagined. Can he bring me his jeans, with her name still on them? She sees now what she was really asking: “Bobby, bring me those chains.”
That watery bass, half sink and half swim. Coming up for air, slowly, after sublimating every single hope.