Tub Diving

Have you ever vanished into your own pain?

Has it ever been so all consuming that it swallows you whole and keeps you wrapped in a timeless void?

Imagine yourself, in bed. Your head is searing with pain. You can't open your eyes.

The light hurts, the sounds bang in your ears, the smells nauseate you.

Blanket on, good for a second.

Blanket off, better for a second.

Toss and turn and find the sweet spot where you can almost stand to be alive.

None of it works.

You stumble your way to the bathroom, go to the tub and draw a bath.

You strip bare, not waiting for the water to fill to a tolerable amount, you hop in, eager to be enveloped by something other than agony.

Nothing else matters outside of this moment.

You've never paid a bill, nor will you ever.

You've never heard of your job nor can you conceive of going to work.

All that exists is this current moment and the all consuming pain.

You close your eyes, the water rises,

Slowly you feel the weight of your body lessening.

Everything from the neck down feels much better,

but your head.

It's throbbing, it feels like there's an entire symphony of pain playing inside your skull, their sounds reverberating off bony walls.

Desperate for anything different, death even, you roll and sink your face underwater.

Silence. The throbbing lessens.

You don't know how long you spend rolling from your stomach to your back to get a breath of air before plunging back under the water.

It's only a sliver of peace, but you'll take it. It gives you a relief from the nightmares above the water.

Eventually, you feel well enough to crawl out of the bathtub and into bed.

You've somehow managed to spend 8 hours in the bath. You're wrinkly and pruned to the point where it hurts to close your palms.

Sometimes you'll throw on a t-shirt before climbing into bed, but not tonight. Tonight you throw your lifeless body onto the bed, buck naked, and cover yourself haphazardly with the sheet. You close your eyes, begging sleep to come. Eventually, it does. Though, it's not restful. You wake and look at the clock, it's 2a.m. Sleep. Wake and check, it's 4:30a.m. Repeat, it's now 6:21a.m. You have 9minutes to send your foreman a text saying you want to use personal time today, before you have to get up and drag yourself into work. Adrenaline pumps through your veins, you've been snapped back into reality for a moment to save your ass. After you hit send, you toss your phone aside and sink back into nothingness and pain.