Jelly

In the vast blue expanse of an ocean, a jelly contracts her bell and propels toward soft light emanating from the unknown. She perceives the world in the only way she can: limited to the experience of efflorescent rays, pressure on her fragile flesh, and saline currents that pierce otherwise stagnant depths. She, as it would seem, lives only in the immediate — a wanton being void of fears for the future or pains from the past.

She contracts. One motion — that’s all she is. This motion is her identity, and the only agency she sees fit to control. The world acts upon her in ways she will never know. Temperatures change. Night and day revolve in seemingly perpetuous cycles. Zooplankton ebb and flow. Tides wax and wane. She escapes, or she pursues. That is all she will ever do.

She contracts. Copepods writhe in her tentacles. Instrument of instinct, she acts upon them unwittingly. She is nothing more. She cannot attach value to them; they are sensations wrought by the world around her. She feels no pain, no elation, no regret. They move up her body to the opening at the base of her bell and she envelops them whole. Digestive juices course and dissolve the creatures, and their spasms slowly cease.

She contracts again, biding her time in the openness. Her delicate body does not deceive her to the creatures who prowl the depths, so she whiles away her hours migrating unhindered from the sun soaked reaches to the silent, crushing dark and back again. She does not care for her kin around her, nor does she need to.

She contracts. Her umbrella collides with another jelly. Gelatinous flesh clashes as her tentacles tangle in the undulating death-snares of the Other. She contracts, contracts, contracts. Her tentacles pop, rent from the rim of her parasol as she struggles to break free. Contracting one final time, she leaps back into the suspension around her; the sensations slowly subside. Rays of light pierce her ocelli and she jets, plashless, for the refuge of the deep. The jelly does not know of death, but life propels her. Life grants her purpose.

She contracts. Her body is changing. The medusa grows weary of the wayward life, tired of drifting, homeless and unsettled. Cell by cell, she undergoes transdifferentiation, loses her umbrella, her trailing tentacles, her phantasmal beauty. She floats downward to a coral reef, now a planula larvae, and she collides with a rock, becomes a polyp squirming on the seafloor, mouth extended upward, tentacles groping the water. She is transcended once again. The jelly survives herself.

She contracts. Her stationery life affords her new opportunities. She communicates with the reef around her, perceives new chemicals on the currents. Brainless, heartless, nerveless, she is little more than the ocean around her. She can stay this way indefinitely. In time, she is encroached upon — she has outlived her space. Nomad by nature, she must once again lift herself into a current, to float, to join the underwater cloud, a plankton once again.

She contracts — pinches herself off. Now a vulnerable ephyra, she must avoid those predators who prowl the depths. She, like all creatures, will grow, and she may die — eaten, starved, or thrown upon the shore — but she has mastered a simplicity yet unlearned. Her cunning is cunningless, but she cares not for those who judge her for her naked form, her lack of complexity, for she will outlive them all. She will experience more than they can begin to imagine, and she will remain delightless, vapid, satisfied, and wondrous beyond all reckoning.

The jelly lives. A nymph forged by a billion nameless beings over hundreds of millions of nameless years, she swims testament to their trials and their triumphs. It would seem to her that life, and its pursuit, are purpose enough. A rock does not worry about its existence, but a jelly is conditioned for it. As is all life — life itself is something to lose.

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