A searing light

I never truly knew how important it was to breathe. But trapped in the small space of the wooden chest, my plump body pushed to the margins, it was all I wanted. Air was everything. The inside of the chest was etched with pencil marks, lines, symbols. No words. I closed my eyes briefly, praying and wishing I would somehow escape this dire situation. As time went on, the space seemed to shrink, slowly dissipating from a large crate to a ring box. I could even see the faint hints of ocean water starting to sink through the crevasses of the wood. I felt like a Jack-in-a-box, my body as the dolls fabric, bended and confined to eventually be winded up and removed to breathe and dance around in excitement. But the difference was that I was never getting out of here, and I would never be happy again.

No one knew that I had been thrown overboard, no one could see the interior of the chest. Inevitability was something I didn’t believe in until this moment. I let out a loud moan, full of fear and hatred and emotions I didn’t even know existed. There were no words for the extreme agony plummeting to your death with no way to elude it caused. All logic and understanding of the world vanished, and all I could do was clasp my hands together and shelter my head against the side board. The fragment of hope that the chest would float and find its way to land disappeared when it was thrusted against a harsh surface and my head banged painfully against the metal clasp on my left. Had I already reached the ocean floor? It didn’t even matter. I imagined the colourful schools of fish these waters held, how they could be swimming past me, brushing their fins against the box, without me even realizing. Without them even realizing that it contained a living, breathing human; a piece of the world above the reef. But soon I’d just be a body, not a human being.

I envied the fish.

Something must have cracked when the chest hit the ocean floor, because the water was rushing in at an alarming rate, sinking through the space between the lid’s lips. It started out as a thin, compressed stream of water, but soon, my white leggings and red lace up boots were drenched. The lock was impossible to crank open from the inside, but I slammed my hand against it anyway. Then I felt a cool surge of water dripping from the tips of my platinum blonde hair. My body told me to give up, to break down, to close my eyes and accept my fate. Why couldn’t I just die faster? My breathing picked up, and I started to hyperventilate. The water was colder than anything I’d ever felt, and it brought an uncontrollable chill to my entire body, especially the tips of my fingers, ears, and nose. I’d probably die from hypothermia before I drowned.

I didn’t have much time left and nothing I tried helped, so I shut my eyelids and cried until I had no more tears left. My limbs needed to escape, to reach out, but all they did was tremble and squirm around. The board above my head pressed me downwards.

The chest was now half way full of water, and soon it would reach my neck. I told myself that I’d let it consume me when it reached that point, but I knew I would try to breathe until the very last moment, cupping my mouth to the top of the crate and hoping it wouldn’t sink in. Even now, I wouldn’t give up.

I should have been thinking about my life, what I had accomplished, what I hadn’t accomplished in my 24 years. I should have smiled to myself and let the remaining air be taken from my lungs, without a thought of what could have been. Death was something everyone experienced, but most would have something to be proud of. A family. A successful career. Love. Experiences. I was too young for such things.

Except for love. I knew exactly how that felt. Love was like poison, delicious and freeing, but cancerous and dangerous. It gnawed at you until it overtook your life, never truly fading away. It was addictive. You always wanted another taste.

But the man I was going to marry, the life we were going to have, the adventures we were going to experience together, would never play out. My clammy hands straightened to my side, clinging onto my thighs that had numbed. I smacked them, trying to revive the feeling in them.

Untold stories were the most unfortunate.

I love you, he had told me just three days previous. Then, my forehead dripped with sweat, and my heart beat just a bit faster. I hadn’t been ready to say it back. What I would do to look in his light blue eyes one last time, and tangle my fingers in his light brown hair.

“I love you too.” I said, as the chest overflowed, the beautiful yet dirty ocean closing in. I expected for my mind to fade away as the moistness surrounded my eyelids and cheeks and nostrils, for me to choke a few times, and then be gone. Why wasn’t that happening? Maybe death wasn’t that easy. Maybe it had to string you along for just a second, fool you into thinking you had a chance, then steal you and never look back. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

I looked back.

My eyes stung like crazy when I opened them, the saltwater making them sizzle with pain like a steak on a grill. My stomach growled after that thought, and I was sure it was eating me alive. How could I think about food when I was dying? I didn’t want my last thoughts to be “I could really eat some chocolate right now.” I shook my head, not able to roll my eyes at myself.

That’s when I was unable to blow bubbles any longer and I gagged, a shaking momentum playing in my head. A bright light dominated my vision, and I assumed I had made it. I was in heaven.

But my body didn’t relax, I didn’t feel my worries fade away, and I didn’t see anything except the light. I looked down at my hands, the chest’s cramped space appearing back in my view. I was most definitely not in heaven.

My jaw dropped when I realized that the blinding, searing light was coming from me. Though that wasn’t the smartest idea, because I just choked more and sunk deeper into the field of the unconscious. It was like I could feel the inner pieces of my brain-- the lobes and cords and arteries and vessels-- swirl together, blending into a pile of mush that could no longer serve me. I had spent years in school, studying and learning all I could. My wits were all I cared about, and acquiring as much knowledge as possible had taken the role of my crutch. I had depended on my intelligence, defined myself by it. How could something I worked so hard for, sweat over, given up my time to, disappear so quickly? Nothing was permanent.

I shot my hands sideways, bracing myself against the side boards. When my wrinkled skin pressed against the harsh wood, I felt something electrifying and terrifying. A spark. Where was this coming from? Water always extinguished fire and heat, so why did my hands feel alive?

I pushed harder even as my mind shut down, closing the curtains to the windows of my life. The spark broke out across the entire crate, and I saw the walls start to disintegrate. It was the last I could do, because the lack of oxygen had finally reached me and weakened me into a shriveled plant that had been deprived of sunlight and air, though overwatered.

My eyelids fluttered closed as I broke out of the crate, pushing my limbs outwards like I had longed to do for so long. The lock didn’t matter anymore, because I had burned the box to the point that the planks split open by themselves. For a brief moment, I had passed out, but the heat my hands provided woke me up again.

I flew towards the surface with a smile on my face, gasping for air. I ignored the fish and the plants and the group of dolphins that weren’t too far from me, directing everything in myself towards making it to the top.

The ocean was wide, both horizontally and vertically, and it seemed to stretch farther than I had anticipated. Soon my body slowed and my momentum was lost, and I floated lazily like baggage. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going, My mind screamed.

Though, even underwater, I could hear the heaves and hoes and whistles of something above me. An alarming hoot sounded out across the sea, shaking myself and the fish back and forth. I looked up with only half an eye open, and the dark mass was revealed.

It was a ship.