In the red ocean, whirling and urgent, she was creative, easily frustrated, manic, and boundlessly energetic. The red ocean submitted to desire, which fed on intrigue. She made things here; had visions; lost sleep; There, she became compulsive. She developed habits that no one understood and worried over things that no one saw.

One of her compulsions involved creating people who didn't exist. She designed lives that entwined and complicated her own. Ask who her favorite was, and she would have said "Michael Fitzgerald." Sophisticated, charming and affectionate, he was the best of her imaginary friends. They went on extravagant trips together, watched serious movies, ate exotic and expensive food. For all anyone knew, he really did exist. She counted whole weeks with Michael, taking careful imaginary notes for the next emergence.

The other ocean, clearer and smoother than the first, consisted mostly of silences. She didn't need to make anything, here. This place obeyed restraint, but in return it promised stillness. She had no need for imaginary people, for she didn't need anyone here, except who might happen in, occasionally.

She and Jonah were in this ocean, swimming through the thick silence, on one of her good days. Small words occasionally bore forth their own intuition. Unspoken chasms and thick, liquid understanding spilled around her. They had been that way for hours.

She smelled the intrudor's sweet breath before the phone even rang, and shuddered. It was her ex-boyfriend, or fuck-buddy, or whatever. She never knew what to call him, but he immediately pulled her into the red ocean, no matter where she had been. A veil of inconsistencies and impossibilities clouded her vision. She was driven by a brutal ethic of imagination that demanded stimulation, but not necessarily clarity or beauty. She told another story.

"Oh, I just got back from dinner. Fitzgerald and I had dinner in Boston. We went to a fish restaurant, and something I ate made me sick, I think. I should probably go..."

At one point she might have taken joy in a deception like this. Here was her intrigue. Here was even a little emotional tension. This time, however, she didn't want to play the old story game. She wanted this one, the very one that slipped so quickly from her lips, to be superfluous. She wanted instantaneous dissolution, and a soft, quiet slippage into the clear pool.

"I'm feeling sick to my stomach, I really need to go."

Jonah watched her grow tenser and tenser as she held the phone. Thin films of pointless talk sat on top of an incomprehensible rage. Waves of chemicals burned their way up her spine, sharp, hot, and rising. Under the pressure of want and need, her fiction and reality started to melt together. On hanging up, she knew that something severe had happened, something blindly permanent.

"Now he thinks I'm... I didn't mean for him to think that I'm..."

"Nothing wrong with what we're doing. Nothing at all."

She looked at Jonah, and looked away, just now realizing what had just broken. She started to float upward again.

Across the miles, she smiled, and said "Michael Fitzgerald?"

He returned the gaze, upward. "Yes." She fell in a graceful pirouette, spinning closer and closer to the blue water. "We'll have to play that movie sometime."

He tilted his head back and circled clear of her falling figure. "The one that we write?"

Her body was quickly approaching the endlessly quiet sea she had been in before. She dove, and silently broke the surface. Water droplets swelled and flickered before disappearing. "Yes."

She felt clear again. The two of them floated among the blue waters, speaking in code.
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