Water is everywhere suspending bits of plants and bright green things. It clings around the contours of each object, magnetized to my finger pad. There is what is above the surface, where we live, and there is what is below the surface, unknown, imagined. Then there is what pierces through, tying the atmosphere to the underworld with darts of light. The marsh is full of reeds, rocks and creatures that permeate this shimmering tension.

A frog the size of my pinkie nail propels itself into a shadier spot. I bring my face close to the ground and shoop! A tiny snail sucks me through the portal. As I plunge, I am shrunk into a silver speck, caught in a beam. We are suspended, the water and me. My ears rush. Then, a swaying reed sucks me back up amidst its thousand siblings rippling with the breeze.

The world vibrates in massive waves, yet each thing has its own pace. Me too. I shift, fall, step, float on my own.

The marsh grows thicker in time. It is heavy yet its billowing is ethereal. An impenetrable room of my own with no ceiling. The firehouse sirens across the street are deflected endlessly until they become a distant melody. Time inhales, vast. I plunge into those weeds for months on end. Our ritual grows deeper roots.

One day in June, as I enter the park and approach the edge of the basin that holds the marsh, I am met by a brisk perfume of freshly cut grasses. I hear motors and the smell turns dire.

In the next hour, a small army of city mowers flattens the airy marsh into a muffled expanse of clippings. In the next days, the minced plants dry. In July and August, they ferment in stagnant rainwater. Then, the taps are turned back on, and the space is flooded into the smooth lake that is there today.

According to the city maintenance plan, the marsh was never there. It was only ever an empty pond basin, and I never visited its underbelly. Nevertheless, the water ripples like a field of grasses now when the wind passes through.

When I pass through, I quake with the cottonwood leaves, dried to a crisp by October, remembering.