She came into my life, not as a specter or an amicable ghost; not as a figure cloaked in the mist of half-dying scenes in accumulating dreams; not as a cerebral usurper that combats with each of my thoughts to take precedence; not as some reincarnated experience. She simply glided into my mind through her epiphanies.

When I was twenty-one years old, I could not tolerate a single reference to her much-celebrated status. I could not understand why she complicated renderings of human experience, when I consistently opted for lucidity in every type of communication. I failed to probe, perceive, or appreciate one single utterance that she had uniquely recreated. However, despite our widely different backgrounds, we still had an affinity, an obsession with water in its diverse manifestations. Aqua, with which her life and work magnificently rippled, was the primary medium through which I had attained solidity. I nearly drowned when I was a child, but my guardian angel sent me two female swimmers who enjoyed bathing during the sunsets of the Mediterranean. One lifted me up, while the other swam to fetch my floating mat, which was slowly drifting into the very far distance. I was quietly floundering without uttering a single plea for assistance – only a desperate attempt to lift my head and continue breathing. I was overwhelmed by the fact that my feet could no longer touch the sea floor, having ventured too deep for my years. The incident did not deter me from improving my swimming skills without an instructor or any type of assistance. Fortunately, no phobia germinated in my nervous system. For years, I kept that near-death experience a secret from my family. It solidified my survival instinct when water was sadly the means by which she, the woman I am speaking of, succeeded in terminating her terrestrial existence. She filled her pockets with stones and waded through water to secure a no-return journey.

She simply transformed my life without a single meeting. No eye contact, no physiognomic readings. No exertion of vocal chords, no English accent to resonate within my hearing. No winsome gestures, no vital presence to animate a lethargic state of being. I became attuned to her planes of consciousness without a cable or a wireless agent. I reverberated to her energy, which had begun to envelope my aura with nebulas of incomprehensible feelings, initiating a quickening and an emotional resuscitation.

I asked myself at times: can a dead person continue living, by dwelling in the deep recesses of our consciousness, conversing with our aesthetic being and nourishing an impoverishment bred by a modern, barren existence? I had to answer myself in the affirmative, since I had already started to converse with her through a frequency that evaded every type of detection. I thought it was funny that people resorted to mediums to conjure up the dead, who were closer to us than the living. There was no need for candles, handholding, a round table, or a spiritual assembly. She colored my ideas with the rainbows of her aesthetic ways of thinking. In my innermost thoughts, she continued breathing.