Sunken Ships
You came into this world with screams and chaos. Typhoon winds and lightning. Years later, nothing has changed. The dysfunction you’ve witnessed has laid a foundation for your fears and deficiencies. Self-preservation is all you know. You tape your mouth shut and hide away in far off corners. You deny and refuse to acknowledge anything that resembles your childhood. You love the wrong people for the wrong reasons and reach for substances that numb. Anything to free you from the reality you never asked for.
The innocence of a child irresponsibly trampled and discarded by arguments and selfishness. Your youth, not quite forgotten, just buried out of necessity to survive. You can’t get that back. Not without shear strength and a shit load of therapy, no doubt.
You eternally drag that trauma with you, like a diseased shadow, or a corpse on a short chain. Every decision you make comes from closed doors, so to not let the pain back in.
It’s not your fault.
You spend your nights in a state of sadness and fury. You toss and turn like a hastily made floatation device. You scream and cry. You clench your jaw until muscles ache and teeth fragment. You lose your appetite like you lose your patience. Dreams are left and forgotten like shelter dogs.
You’ve been deserted.
You were thrown this life, these circumstances, by inept guardians, neglectful keepers. Like a rotted pier in a hurricane, your support systems splinter and float out to sea. There was no one around to teach you to swim. They didn’t teach you anything. Your survival skills, or lack thereof, were pieced together with band-aids and wishful thinking. Struggle as you might, your life preserver quickly sinks to isolated depths of loneliness and exhaustion.
You weren’t meant for this world.
Slowly, you allow your lungs to fill with water. You cough and gasp. You fight for survival, but now you’ve sunk too deep. Vision grows blurry. Limbs stop flailing. Your heart has shattered. The sandy bottom full of bones and decaying flesh nears. Your lifeless body gracefully touches down in surrender. You feel nothing — except peace.
You’re not dead.
Ocean floors are a scary place. They’re dark, foreign, and unprotected. An alien world where the most frightening creatures and ghouls reside. It’s where lost and forgotten boats go to die. But that’s the chance you take if you want to float on calm seas. Though fear renders you frozen, and ignorance, inactive, this is your new home.
The bottom is where you begin again.
It won’t be easy. You still carry heavy weights. The cannonballs and anchors of your past. But that old life is what prepared you for the most daunting ascent of your existence. A single ray of sunlight refracts through black waters like a bullet through gelatin. It calls out your name. You’ve always had the choice to swim.
You just have to learn how.
