Tell me what the seabed looks like. Tell me how it feels to open your eyes underwater and be stung with blurred beauty, with the swirling ribbons and the false shimmers, how it feels to be wrapped in that hazy, slow blue-green cocoon. Tell me how the sand feels underneath the pads of your feet. Tell me how it feels to hold one’s breath and sink.

I haven’t been in the water since I was seven years old. Sometimes, though, the dreams are so vivid it feels like I have.

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Let me tell you about Norway, in return for your telling me about the sea. Perhaps you'll want to hear about somewhere more exotic. I could tell you about Tehran and Jakarta and Sumatra. I could tell you about the bridges and the shoulders and the air and the gardens. I could tell what the sky looks like in the summer, whether the buildings are heavy or light, whether the accents are made of iron or paper. But I'm not going to, of course.

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I was born in a town where every fall the rain would fill up the parking lot behind the pharmacy and no one did anything about it. It was a town of packaged and passed on family business and doors without locks. When I left for college I told myself I’d never come back. But four years later there I was in my mother’s living room, eating tortilla chips and staring at the rain. Seven months later I was gone again, this time for good.

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I told you I would tell you about Norway but I feel you won’t quite understand unless you hear about a whole lot of other stuff first. Stuff that sometimes seems not to matter and other times seems utterly paramount to the story.

You deserve to hear the whole story, to understand the whole story, especially if you are to give me a detailed description of what it’s like to dive down and touch the sea floor with open outstretched palms.

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I was born in a town where people didn’t disappear, where families lived in hundreds in the graveyards and every child was a great-grandchild and every house was a relic, where only high school diplomas and family photographs framed in tarnished wood lined the staircases of the homes of aging women who kept asking when they would become grandmothers.

I was an only child which was strange and a burden. But it also meant there was less matter in that town of mine pulling me back. I go back a couple times a year- or try to- but it’s hard to bear. The yellowness of my mother’s wallpaper is a little too yellow, the muskiness in the curtains a little too thick and the nauseous inertia a little too heavy. The staleness is everywhere.

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I still haven’t told you about Norway and it’s rather important that I do. I don’t plan to bore you with the whole business of Fjords and flat land. What I want to tell you about are the rocks.

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I started having the nightmares a year after the accident. They always occur at the same place with the same people. They’re hard to remember but there are some things I know to be true. Firstly, I’m always there with my mother and a young girl that I somehow am sure is my sister and a woman wearing black sunglasses. The water in the pool is always too blue.

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Some nights when I was back for those seven months we would lie in the parking lots with our mouths open and wait for it to rain.

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Only three people in the town have my phone number, and my current address. Only one knows I have a daughter now.

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My mother bought the tortilla chips from the hardware store because she didn’t like driving all the way to the mall.

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And now I’m going to tell you about Norway, but before I do I’d like to clarify one more detail of our bargain. You are to tell me of the sea, of its feet and its body and its breath. You are to tell me every detail of what it looks like, feels like, smells like. But you are not to tell me what it tastes like.

Some nights I wake up and think I’m still choking.

I remember what it tastes like. Now let me tell you about Norway.