Abyss has no biographer -- 

[emily dickinson]

I'm in Mexico. I'm thirty-four. You died a year ago today.

I dive into a cenote. Floating on my back, I watch the stalactites drip their way atom by atom ever closer to the surface of the water, anchored to the roof of this subterranean cave.

Millions of years ago, an asteroid the size of Mount Everest hit this part of the world, shattered it the way only a moving mountain can. The fractured limestone deep under the surface never recovered. It  collapsed into sinkholes in places, crevasses in the ground that gradually filled with rainwater filtered through the ground above over millennia. The Mayans called them something else, but to the Spanish it sounded like cenote, sweet and sharp. 

I flip over and tread the surface, the white flash of my feet fluttering so far above the bottom. The water is clear, but I've been in enough deep things to not be fooled. It's blue and green and lovely, but with a dark crevasse running straight through the center. Some of them are so deep that the bottom has yet to be found, if there is one at all.

When we were standing in the ruins of Uxmal earlier that day, our guide spoke to us about the Mayans, about what they believed about the underworld. El inframundo, where the spirits of the dead fall.

The Mayans believed in cycles, the guide said. Xibalbá is simply where you go after you have had your years in the world of the living, where the soul continues its journey.

There are several sacred routes to Xibalbá, thin places, where if the living are bold enough they can glimpse the next world. They say that walking the Milky Way is one. The other is in the bottom of a cenote, where the Mayans threw their sacrifices, their tributes, their beloved dead.

My feet churn, keeping me afloat. So far below them, I see the crevasse. I don't know how to walk the Milky Way. I hold my breath and swim down, down, as far as I can go. When the pressure in my ears builds past bearing I open my eyes.

It's so silent. I can only hear my own heartbeat. The water is warm, clear. It presses against me like a palm, like the wall of a womb. 

I can't see the crevasse. I only see a blur of blue in every direction. I stay for one heartbeat, then another. But then, the ache in me is too much. I have to go back. I have to go back, Dad. I have to breathe. 

You would have loved it here. The colors, so many things old and abandoned. I know that in a way, you're seeing it through my eyes, and that makes it a little better. 

You were always afraid of dying, and I never was, but now I am. I think of you mingling with the desert you loved so well, and usually that feels right but today it just feels lonely, too. I just wish you were here. I just wish you had been able to see this, too. Your death was awful and it came far too soon and I haven't been able to stop being afraid ever since I realized you no longer knew our names.

I woke up today thinking that I'm the same age you were when I was born.

The Mayans understood death as a cycle, but that doesn't mean they welcomed it, said the guide. They mourned their dead long and hard. They feared death, and had rituals and bloodletting to keep it at bay. They dreamed that they would see their loved ones again. 

At Uxmal, I just stared at the carvings on the wall of a pyramid older than Christ. For a moment I didn't feel the weight of time bearing down, all that had been lost or forgotten, countless lives lived with such alien beauty left to mark them. All I could think was that they missed their fathers, too.