This is Drowning

I wished I was in a pool or a lake or an ocean.  I wished I was swimming out beyond the point at which my toes could still graze the bottom while water splashed my chin.  I wished I could go under, submerge myself entirely, hold my breath and swim and swim and swim until I lost all sense of direction, until light and sound and breathing were muffled memories, until –  Until they weren’t.  Until instinct to breathe came rushing back, propelling my body upward.  Until I broke the surface and felt the light before I saw it.  And still, for a moment, I would be treading water.  I would have a distinct sense of nowness beneath the open sky, with only an abstract sense of place – only a learned sense that this is life and I am in it.

Instead I sat at a desk beneath a concrete ceiling and florescent lights, overwhelmed by my sense of place and lacking all sense of time, unable to believe that hours or days or years existed or had ever existed, unable to believe that seasons happened or that change happened or that it was possible for anything to happen other than this – this fact of being there.  Right there.  In a windowless office, beneath florescent lights and a concrete ceiling, surrounded by blue cubicle walls.  And I had a sense that I had gone under, that I had lost all sense of direction.  And I couldn’t breathe.  And I was shaking – or was that my heartbeat?  And I wondered what instinct would come rushing back to me.  I wondered what would save me.