The water doesn't just cover me; it extinguishes the world. There is a sound like absolute silence—a heavy, velvet pressure, as if someone has simply turned off the light. Everything vanishes into a murky, suffocating dark that swallows the surface and the lakebed alike. I am suspended in a void where I can no longer find the shape of my own hands.
I am sinking.
The realization drifts through my mind like smoke, sluggish and delayed. My body has become a collection of leaden weights—the soaked wool of my blazer, the exhaustion in my marrow, the accumulated gravity of every day I barely survived. All of it is dragging me down into the cold.
Instinct should take over. The animal part of my brain should kick my legs and thrash my arms toward the light, but the machinery is broken. My body remains passive, a heavy object accepting the descent as if it always belonged to the deep. The cold isn't just a touch anymore; it's an invasion. It seeps past my skin to settle in my core, manifesting the same hollow emptiness I carried in my apartment, but now it's physical. It's real.
My lungs begin to burn. The small pocket of air I managed to trap is sour and thin. The fire in my chest intensifies—a sharp, urgent scream for oxygen that my limbs refuse to answer.
Time distorts. A single second of submersion stretches into a lifetime. I am caught in a glitch of existence, a moment both infinite and instantaneous, where the pressure in my head builds until the darkness is absolute. I've lost the horizon. Up and down have dissolved into the same endless, freezing black.
In the darkness of the moonlight, I suffocate. I collapse. I seem to fall into the deep sea. I cannot struggle. I am swallowed by the darkness...
The words flicker in my mind like a dying lamp, a remembered truth that finally matches my reality. I am being erased. And then, in the heart of that erasure, a spark flares—a sudden, violent recognition that cuts through the numbness.
I don't want this.
It's a small, quiet thought at first, nearly lost to the roar of my pulse. But it grows, sharpening into a shocking clarity that shatters the day's paralysis.
I don't want to die.
The urgency is a physical blow. I want the sky. I want the sun. I want the simple, solid ground I so recently despised. I want a future, even if its a painful one, even one where I have to face every door I couldn't open. I want to live.
Move. Please. Move.
I plead with my muscles. I beg the machine to restart. But the weeks of neglect—the empty meals, the stagnant days, the long hibernation—have left me bankrupt. I will my arms to stroke, my legs to kick, but they drift like kelp, heavy and useless. The will is there, roaring and desperate, but my body is a separate, broken thing that no longer takes commands.
The terror that follows is primal and pure. It is the polar opposite of the morning's emptiness. It is the horror of a mind waking up just as the heart begins to fail. I watch my own betrayal in real-time, my spirit screaming to fight while my frame continues its slow, graceful descent.
The burning in my lungs becomes a physical scream. My body, governed by a programming older than my will, finally overruns me. My mouth opens. The water rushes in—a shocking, violating weight that fills the spaces meant for breath. I convulse, my chest heaving as it tries to expel the liquid, but each spasm only invites more of the lake inside.
No. No. Please.
The prayer goes unanswered. The panic begins to ebb, not into peace, but into a heavy, crushing resignation. I am dying in the dark, alone, at the exact moment I finally decided to stay.
I'm sorry.
The apology fills my fading consciousness, for myself, for the life I am discarding, for the realization that came too late. The darkness isn't just around me now; it's moving inside. The internal lights of my mind flicker and go out, one by one. My heart slows, its frantic rhythm stumbling, trying to pump a life that is already half-water.
I wanted to live. I finally wanted to live.
The grief of that thought is more agonizing than the drowning. I found my spark in the middle of a grave.
"This feeling... I hope no one understand it!"
The pressure turns to a heavy, numbing embrace. My heart beats once, a dull thud against the water in my chest. Then twice, a fading echo.
Silence takes me.