A night-time swimmer feels this without being told. As the water holds a shoulder here, a knee there, a hand surfacing or disappearing — the body is no longer a single thing. Hair drifts and becomes weed, skin takes on the grain of sand, the arm moves with the wave, eyes closed — a threshold of stillness and all is the same: a figure not against a ground.
The swimmer turns onto their back. The surface of the water catches what little light there is and throws a version of their body upward — a wavering shape, broken by ripples, projected against the sky. From below they are flora; from above they are cloud. The same arm that lay among the weeds is now scattered among the stars. Nothing about the body has changed. Only the surface between worlds has tilted, and the body has been read twice, in two different alphabets, by two different distances.
Scale is a relationship.
