Drowning

How does one manage to go so swiftly and so completely from the high of wedding bells to the euphoric, yet crushing feeling of drowning? It's pounding around me, all this shit. I can see the surface, can see happiness, and yet I can't seem to touch it. It's just out of reach. The light washes over me in patches, but my hair is ballooning around me now, and I can hardly see anything. Something is pulling me down.

The crushing fear comes first; what if? What if it actually happens? What if I die cold, wet, and alone? Shivering, tied with metal and concrete to this murky and weightless golden green world? I can see nothing but murky water and the ghostly shapes of fish and seaweed going about their daily business. I can feel nothing but currents and chill as I fall deeper and deeper, and the surface and the light, salvation and happiness, get further and further away. My arms claw for purchase on something of their own regard, pinwheeling in an attempt to bear me upward toward the surface, toward air. My lungs cry for breath, though I pinch my lips shut. And the fear that I'll never see that brilliant sun crushes me, just as the pressure of the millions of gallons of water presses on me.

The terror that rips through me cries of the many small happinesses of lying in the grass on a summer's day, climbing a tree as the wind whips my hair into a frenzy, biting into a sweet apple and watching its golden juice bead up and leak down the side. The sight of my family's faces. Curling up with a book in a winter chill, the comforting warmth of my dog next to me. Watching a cloud. These things are lost to me now, and I know not what comes next.

That simple thought triggers something in me. A simple acceptance of my fate. I don't know what will come next, and this allows me to resign myself somehow to my fate. My arms are no longer clawing for purchase, my eyes no longer straining for the surface, and my lungs no longer crying for air as I hold my breath. I can stop and look around, and I know that this is not the worst of sights as a last sight. This is not the worst of feelings as a last feeling. My hair, my clothes, my arms are all pulled and tugged by water, my body weightless as the concrete block hits rock bottom with an ethereal echo, an eternal thud that cries through the dampened world about me, announcing my arrival to all those present. But there is simple resignation in me now.

I just wish there was the euphoria of death to meet me as the air rushes from my lungs.

Instead there is a "what if" that keeps nagging at my ear. What if this isn't rock bottom? What if, as time goes on, I will be borne deeper into the murky waters? What if...?

Yes, this sounds like a bunch of "emo" mumbo jumbo, and it makes sense to none but me. But I understand it, and this blog is about me, so you'll have to stuff it. ^_^ Now back to the happy mask.

I just wish there was the euphoria of death to meet me.