I was sitting at the shore of what I took to be a still lake, awaiting the stultifying monotony to cease.

Why was I impressed into being here? This finite thing with arms and legs and a limited perspective, staring out over other strange forms?

At my saddest moment, a sprite appeared, and hovered around my head.

With a wry half-smile, she suggested I doff my clothes and dive into the lake. Having nothing better to do at all in this awful world, I obliged.

The sudden caress of cold water was invigorating. I felt my body. I felt the fluid surrounding and embracing it. I felt motion. I felt vast space.

With me treading, the sprite pointed below: see the fish? Look at them, how shiny and scaly and stupendous! The plants and the snails and the things in the soil: everything down there is alive.

My eyes widened in awe. I felt the wind blow through my wet hair.

The sprite came near to my ear. She whispered in her sweetly fateful voice: it is all in motion. It is all beautiful. It is all changing. It is all dancing.

Then, instantly, the sprite was gone. I realized I had had some kind of hallucination, and I was now naked, in the lake, with my clothes by the shore. Treading water. Alone.

Sadness momentarily returned. I am alone.

But then the sprite's whisper, now distant, spoke one last time:

In fact, you were never separate. Now don't stop swimming. What fun would that be?

The tears that followed as I swam further from shore, out into the unknown, were not those of sadness