Through the clear foaming water my skin looks absolutely, impossibly, smooth and lily white. I think for a moment that I look like Venus in that most famous painting. My tanned arms are floating off in opposite directions from my body; my tanned legs obscured by busy bubbles. Only when the burden of gravity is removed do my breasts appear untired. I like the way I look through the refraction.

But my ribcage aches.

I'm here because I needed a bit of healing. The water - at 102 degrees - is a little too hot, but I force myself to stay sunken to my chin in it. I'm alone and the music from the radio is barely audible above the roar of bubbles just below my earlobes. When the bubbles shut off, the radio is too loud and I realize I'm really unable to just sit in the present with it on. I turn it off. There I am now, truly just in the moment.

And it is excruciating. I have been so sick and barely - just barely - able to ward off the nausea. I'm surprised that just thinking makes me want to vomit; the knowledge of which makes me unsure that I'm so sick merely because I've been self-destructing. Not just the self here, I'm afraid.

The question comes again from inside of me. It just appears there in my head as if I meant to say it to myself in some appropriate context, but there is no context - at all. It's just there. Earlier, writhing on a bed of air, in the midst of bizarre images that were not dreams because I was awake, but images over which I seemed to have no control, the question appeared too. I saw it as a thick banner gliding across the screen of my eyelids, dominating over all else there.

Where am I?

It seems so silly. I'm here, of course. I can open my eyes and see the place. I could even describe to you all of the things in the near vicinity, and the feeling of a slight breeze cooling my cheeks. I'm struck by the notion of my soul interrupting my consciousness to ask me - more than once - so I relent and turn all of my attention to it. That's when I see that all around me is nothing, and I am literally just floating without an anchor. Again, I'm feeling the weightlessness of just being and nothing more. It is too horrible to stay, so I leave it.

The water is a little too hot.