Manual for Breathing Underwater

1- Forget the surface.

It was never yours to keep.

The sky will wait — it always does.

Down here, light bends until it forgets its name.

2- Do not fight the water.

It doesn’t hate you.

It simply doesn’t know what lungs are.

Let it hold you the way grief does —

tight, total, almost tender.

3- Inhale memory instead of air.

Every moment you refused to feel

has been waiting here, suspended.

Take small breaths.

They burn less that way.

4- Listen.

There’s music in the pressure —

the thrum of your pulse,

the echo of what you thought was silence.

Even the deep hums if you stay long enough.

5- When panic comes — and it will —

don’t reach for the surface.

Reach inward.

There’s a tide inside you too,

and it knows how to rise.

6- Names dissolve underwater.

Let yours go.

It will come back when you’re ready to answer it again.

7- You are not drowning.

You are being translated.

Into patience.

Into stillness.

Into something that breathes differently.

8- When you finally return to air,

don’t rush to tell anyone what it was like.

Some things are meant to stay fluid.

Just smile, and let the salt dry on your skin —

proof that you went under,

and lived.