Instead, after the first awkward descent, the world changed.
Not dramatically.
It softened.
The noise of the beach vanished.
Sunlight broke into shifting pieces around us. Sand rippled below. A silver fish passed close to my shoulder, entirely uninterested in my face, my name, my album sales, or whether the internet considered my last award-show dress a triumph or a cry for help.
Ellie hovered in front of me.
She gave the okay signal.
I returned it properly.
Her eyes crinkled behind her mask.
It was ridiculous how much that pleased me.
We moved slowly along the shallow reef.
Ellie stayed close enough to reach me if something went wrong but far enough away that I could pretend I was doing this alone.
She pointed out a blue tang, a sea urchin, and a tiny shrimp hiding inside the coral.
The fish did not recognize me.
The shrimp did not ask for a photograph.
The sea urchin had no opinion about my dating history.
Underwater, nobody could shout Savannah.
Nobody could ask about my next album.
Nobody could decide whether I looked tired.
I was simply Annie, with bad buoyancy and an increasingly hostile relationship with mask clearing.
At one point, Ellie pointed at a conch shell half-buried in the sand and pressed one hand dramatically to her chest.
I laughed into the regulator.
Bubbles burst out of me in a wild, undignified rush.
Ellie’s shoulders shook.
She was laughing too.
The moment should not have felt romantic.
We were wearing masks, fins, and enough equipment to qualify as awkward furniture. My hair was probably floating around my head like haunted seaweed.
But Ellie looked so delighted by my complete lack of underwater grace that something inside me loosened.
When we surfaced forty minutes later, I pushed my mask up and took in real air.
“Well?” Ellie asked, treading water beside me. “Did you become soup?”
