I remember my night-light watch read 12:03 for the last time. It was five minutes ago? Or maybe a few hours. The deep ocean water pressure has since cracked it, leaving 12:03 the last time known to me.

The headlamp on my suit is still working, with an unsteady flicker now and then. Blurry shapes swim in and out of sight, brown and grey and no other colors. Some even brush against me, or ram into me, then quickly pass into the dark. Or maybe they are staying still, I’m thinking, and it’s me that’s drifting and running into them. Motion is relative.

By design the suit is keeping me warm. I notice the calculator in my head has finally stopped. No more “X hours left of oxygen and heating”, or “Y additional ways to send distress alarm”. Like the industrious moments you see in heroic movies about human triumphs.

Those movies are nice, for people who are foreseeably alive. They are also a lie, a strong hand over the mouth of the dying, muffling the words of their forbidden tale. The vast majority of catastrophe victims do not survive. They depart with a whimper, without witness. That is a fact.

This is reminding me the time we drove to Zion National Park to watch the famed starry night sky. Except that night there was only clouds. The air seemed to glow a bit on its own, and we could almost see the undulating landscape in the dark. We waited lying down on the top of the cooling car and I melted into a dreamless sleep. We were told that was the darkest dark there is.

Right now I’m suspended in the amniotic fluid of planet earth, surrounded by a darkness never known to me before. It might as well be an ocean of black ink. Now this is some darkness. Darkness absolute. Beckoning me to sleep.

There is nothing left to do but to sleep.