A poetic reflection on a year gone by, much has changed, life is worth living.
Fighting toward the surface, the water seemed to move through me.
Struggling, feeling my mind going light, dark, then dizzy. I needed air.
I couldn’t move.
The pressure around me pushed into me like the blackness of a thousand souls weeping into my ears. It was more than I could bear. Darkness took my eyes.
I could not see.
The light from the surface was a dim reminder of what living meant, what it used to be. No more.
I couldn’t breathe.
Grasping at my chest, feeling the rapidly fading strength of my pulse. , I fought my thoughts of survival, but I knew my body had given up. I was going to drown.
I breathed.
It hurt.
I died.
The moments after this drowning were even harder as the loveliest knew not my pain. They could not see the loss – the drowning – the death of life that I had finally observed, embraced, and welcomed…
Nothing helped.
I couldn’t live.
Anchored to memories that held me, in that final breath I knew I had to let them go. It was time. When reason overtakes despair it is a bitter pairing of love and terror. Little things that were once mountains became worthless. Gold-laden seasons of bliss a puddle soon evaporating leaving little but a stain upon the surface of what once was a deep.
Yes, this is my story.
The story of when I realized I was in a trench beneath the sea of seas, beyond reach grasping for the surface that had long launched beyond the atmosphere of this sea. I just hadn’t noticed. I was not blind but yet not seeing just the same. Fairytales of harmonies played with melodies of each dance, each refrain, echoing as if to tell me “This is good, life is well, walk along… be merry.”
But Hell was there.
Disguised as a friend in the bellows of tears told to smile. Offering a hand when behind the emptiness of eyes so fair left nothing… awakening… seeing for the first time when what appeared as light was no longer shining, the true light revealed its birth: it was not what it was never, it was never what it was, it lies.
I drowned that day in the puddles of my own making, naivety skipping so jolly toward the cliffs that were already falling. Admittance to this jester’s show did not make me laugh. The irony…
Living to be true but getting the joke, the punchline, the laugh of laughter all along has been my life. So where?
Who am I?
What do I want?
“I want to live?” I thought… yet that is what I was doing – but not.
Living in the frame of another’s ideal me… that’s the truth.
There is a positive side to drowning. It kills that man.
Pressure relieved, sight is true, the breathing is living, the life renewed.
Old ways are deeper still, never moved, not one place, yet my head is just above the water. I can breathe in my sea, among my depths, and embrace the melodies, the jester’s mockeries, the fair-eyed friends of sorts, and the eloquence of trueness.
Yes. This is living.
Do you see?
Can you breathe?
Are you listening?