I close my eyes; within me lies a boundless universe where stars are born and fade, where winds blow without direction. In the midst of infinity, I drift, entirely weightless. Then... I take a breath. As my ribcage rises and falls, I crash into that heavy wall of flesh and bone with a resounding thud. The struggle of my inner being to fit into this body is like trying to pour a colossal, wildly churning ocean into a narrow glass of water. Neither can the ocean fit into the glass, nor can the glass bear that immense pressure; every drop that fails to fit overflows and is wasted, the deepest waters of my soul spilling away in vain.

This mass of flesh and bone is practically a fragile, fracturing shard of glass trying to contain those exuberant waters. The face I see when I stand before the mirror is so far from reflecting that boundless, nameless ocean within me... A foreign silhouette stares back; my bioluminescence is absent in its eyes, my deep-sea storms do not rage across its lines. That reflection is a makeshift vessel that cannot speak the language of my soul, a vessel that does not belong to me. While my body surrenders to the relentless march of time and exhaustion, that core essence within me does not lose a single drop. This is the true tragedy: the roar of an entire sea knotting up and drying out in a mortal throat.

While the waters within me yearn to flow beyond time and space, to breach boundaries and swallow continents, to simply surge freely; my body becomes increasingly entangled in the heavy chains of pain, the need for sleep, and physical matter. That overflowing energy thrashing inside me is so powerful I feel as though it might shatter this glass cup it is imprisoned within at any moment, seeping out through my veins. Millions of unsaid, inexpressible sensations dwell in the darkest depths of my mind. Yet, this tongue of flesh is incapable of translating those silent and profound currents. Human language remains so primitive beside the whisper of the ocean that sometimes I simply choose to stay silent. And as I remain silent, that glass becomes narrower, its walls piercing my soul.

This is no protective armor; this is a deaf wall built around a shoreless sea. The struggle of a boundless entity to exist in a world with sharply drawn borders... I do not fit. I do not fit into words, into rooms, into cities, and most of all, into my own skin. To carry a massive ocean within my ribcage, only to be forced to watch the outside world from behind the misty glass of that narrow cup... This is the deepest, most suffocating, and most desperate sorrow of my soul.