Shipwreck

I am drowning in the thick molasses of silence. This emptiness is not like sailing on regular waters. No. Lately the only salt water I’ve come into contact with are the miniature rivers that run down my cheeks when I think too much. No easy sailing here. Some days the stillness is deceptive, like I’m floating on a calm, glassy sea. Any small snag, however, and the sticky brown syrup of loneliness and panic starts to bubble up, threatening to swamp my small dingy at any moment. I cannot let myself forget that it is not water on which I sail. Water can be swallowed, coughed up, dried out. This molasses is a killer; it’ll make you choke or drown before it’ll allow itself to be pushed out of your lungs.

In the old days of sailing on water, even though it was often stormy and I struggled against the whirlwinds of life battering my sails, at least I knew I could swim if my boat ever capsized. There was small comfort in the knowledge that I was a strong swimmer and would make it back to the boat. Now, the sheer weight of the substance I’m treading in makes me tired. Every kick and stroke is a fight that fatigues. Every breath I take is more frantic and gasping as my lips sink dangerously closer to the deep. I’ve lost my dingy, though it’s hull bobs up and down seemingly not far from me. I know I’ve lost it because every move I make back toward it is slower and smaller. This loneliness will pull me under like a riptide, and I will have no idea which way is up in this dark, heavy, oppressive expanse. I’ve made it back to the boat before, but each time weakens me more than the last. Some small voice in me wonders why I don’t just set myself adrift. I don’t know how to counter its suggestion, but I can’t yet seem to stomach letting go.

The sirens of depression and anxiety swim through this silence with speed and effortless grace. Their songs call out to me when I am weakest, harmonizing so sweetly as they call for me to join them in the deep. I wonder what it would be like to follow them, to breathe the sticky syrup into my lungs and go catatonic in the thickness of this silence. Instead, I fight to keep my face above the surface and pray that one day soon this molasses will turn back into water. Sometimes, the sirens swim up and tug playfully on my feet, run their webbed fingers down my spine, try to wrap their arms around me to pull me under. I hold my breath for days on end, my nose and mouth an agonizingly close but murderous few inches below the surface. When my lungs start to burn is when I am finally able to snap myself out of their enchanting embrace, kicking my way free to the surface, gasping and gulping air once more.

It takes days to recover and remember how to tread the silence again.

One day I will drown, or learn how to fly. Only time will tell.