When I was a fish my friends were fish too. It’s funny, we found each other again when we were human. I just can’t find my ancestors. Because I was a fish for too long, I think. Some of them might have swum with me, I hope so, alongside me, before my leap into the dry oxygen above passing over in some ship into the dreams of my mother who made me real again.

Wake up gasping for the breath of the broken surface, broken the from the wrong side.

If you were a fish it means you’re always looking.

I found a world the other day. It was down an alley between two buildings. You walk along the alley from one side and then come out again on the side that you came from, like the threshold of a mirror. The other world is the mirror side, but it’s the same way round. The difference is that we’re not there, we’re not in it, this other world. The streets are the same streets with plants grown through, baby forest, pre-forest beginnings. I was scared to explore too far alone. I went back to the world many times alone, only exploring for five, ten minutes.

I brought Benji there, so I would have someone to look with me. He was never a fish. Both feet solid to the ground, heels, toes, he was earth and physics. I thought he would like to see the saplings growing through tarmac and brick.

— What sort of fish? He asked me once.

— So many, I told him, not remembering my bodies, only the dark movement of water through and in me, and the touch of ocean plants.

He trusted me so we went down the alley and into that other world. – where? He said as he stepped from the alley into the softening street.

— The other world, I explained again.

— No, what part of London are we in?

— The same part, I think. Look the street names, the shops.

He was looking at his phone.

— It won’t be on your phone.

He closed his phone screen.

— I’ll ask them, he said, jogging away.

There was someone else in the world. This was unprecedented, as in never before. I watched Benji talk to this stranger, a standard person, hoodie, jeans, trainers, headphones, head down. Two humans speaking on a street corner, weeds under their feet, a tall stalk of dandelion against the bricks of the wall the stranger leans against. The world was over grown. This was a version of the world I’d just walked out of, with nature making the air green, pollen almost visible in a heavy haze. I thought I was the only one, I was wrong.

Benji gestured over to me, the stranger didn’t look. They nodded to each other, made hand signs, separated. The stranger left in a direction I hadn’t explored, leaving crushed grasses to show their path. I heard rustlings, like an animal. The other world may have been repopulating itself.

— What’d they say?

— Same as you.

— Same?

— Yeah, one end of the alley’s Hackney, so is this end. I’m just surprised I don’t know this part.

— You don’t think it’s a bit

— Needs some TLC. Council needs to come sort it out.

— Where are the people?

— You just saw one.

— Okay.

It was sunny so we sat in the meadow that was a street in the solid world, and allowed the sun of this different place to sink into our skin. The warmth called up ancestral instincts and memories that I couldn’t grip. Benji sunbathed in the other world, thinking it was normal, because he was made of earth. I knew that this place flowed upstream instead of down because I had once been a fish.

But before I was a fish I was a human, who had been consumed by the sea and its creatures, and so I didn’t return to the other world after that visit with Benji. I decided to be more like Benji, who knew where he came from and could still talk to his ancestors. In the next life or the one after that all of the water will have left me and I’ll be mud and roots again, eternally returning to the same world. That other world will become invisible. I’ll be at home and all my friends will be mammals with red warm blood, and if I stray an ancestor will guide me back.

This world was made to be a mirror with no edge, a surface that constantly returns to itself, turning only to return, and everything that has already happened will happen again. We might slip away sometimes but this world will pull us back, as the moon makes constant watch on the rise and fall of lands and tide.

We were fish, trawled back to this world. We gasp now but not forever.