Daily Write 8-07-2020
Newstart
The pause lifted. All at once, the thoughts surged outward like a wave, crashing upon stagnant shores.
The first step was the hardest.
But she had made it. She was alive, breathing, thinking, conscious, panting on the edge of the sea, exhaling breaths that had been held for years. She dropped to all fours, hacking and coughing and feeling the sand beneath her fingers, clinging to her wet, naked skin, grains burrowed underneath her fingernails.
There was no time to think- or rather, to think now would be a waste of what she could instead experience, eternal in the moment. Gasping, and laughing, she looked back at the silent ocean, lapping noiselessly against the shore.
She remembered being submerged. She had been trapped in that limbo, legs clenched against her chest, pounding against the spasms of her suppressed lungs. She had been dragged across the ocean floor, for what seemed like years, carried by the tide, not once opening her eyes for fear of the reality she might orient herself to.
But she had not drowned. She had thought and deliberated her own death yet emerged unscathed from the other side. She could feel her lungs, her heart, beating in joy of being alive.
She gazed out at the ocean again. Still and silent. The eerie moon lay over the horizon, and the breeze of the night chilled her wet skin. And carried by that wind, a faint cry. A cry for help.
Looking towards the horizon, she saw an irregularity bobbing. A small shining figure, thrashing, barely floating. Their eyes wide open, bloodshot from salt and terror.
She stood paralyzed, strangely at peace with the moment. The distance between them seeming eternal.
The figure’s head disappeared under the water.
Her heart beat again. No time to think, to find bearings. To appreciate the stars peaking out from beyond the clouds, the way the horizon curved beyond her view. One foot in the water, then another. She knew the consequences. What she had fought, struggled to escape in the darkness behind her closed eyelids. Yet nonetheless, she surged forward, body disappearing below the line, becoming again unseen, unknown, unspeakable.
She dived under, and the pause of silence came crashing over the beach once again.
