The Deep Ocean Trenches

You slip beneath a starlit sea and sink, without effort, through the sunlit water and the long blue twilight into a darkness the sun has never reached. Small living lights blink on and drift away. Marine snow falls, soft and endless, all the way down to a floor of pale sediment older than memory. Further down still lie the trenches, where the pressure feels only like stillness and there is nowhere deeper to go.

The ending, given away now, per house rules: let your breathing go slow, and slow, and slower. There is nothing else to wait for, which is the point.

The first minute

Wherever you are as you listen to this, whatever kind of day it has been, you can let it come to an end now. It is over. It asks nothing more of you. Let your shoulders sink down, away from your ears. Let the surface beneath you take your weight completely. You do not have to hold yourself up any longer. You do not have to hold anything at all. Let your hands grow soft. Let your breathing slow, all on its own. There is nothing here to watch for tonight. Nothing to decide. Nothing you will need to remember…

Why this one works at night

One slow direction, downward, and nothing waiting at the end of it. An easy thing to follow, and an easier thing to let go of. The pace is slow and sinking, and the whole of it is dark, cool, weightless. Nothing in it asks to be followed closely, which is what makes it easy to let go of.

“…There is little to eat, this deep in the sea, and so the animals of the dark have learned to live slowly, and to spend almost nothing, and—”

The kind of sentence people fall asleep during