aquatic gravity

“aquatic gravity” by The Soup


I’m normal, I swear.  Just a normal boy… but something’s wrong with me.  Something’s not right inside me, my heart, my mind.  That’s why she left me.

That’s why I’m tragically all alone.

--

The sky’s cracking open, the sound of bringing heaven down—black.  Rain.  A heavy downpour, shredding dryness in a thick wash of cold, prickly water-spikes, swallows me, consumes me, as I stand at the ship’s bow.  The rain is eating me alive, freezing me numb.  That’s what I need. 

That’s what I deserve.

I don’t want to feel anymore.  I welcome the numbness.  I need it sorely. 

Very soon, I’m drenched to the bone, and I can’t feel my fingertips, shoulders, face, but my chest still burns with an unknown anguish that makes me what to do it even more. 

God lets the rain of what I feel right now come down.

I close my eyes and experience this moment: the sharp rain piercing the warmth from my body; the swelling of the ocean eagerly crashing up to the deck, swoshing across the boards and around my ankles; the jittery thud-thud of my heartbeat throbbing against my aching ribs.  And, of course, there’s an angry emptiness overwhelming my innards, swarming me with a great deal of heaviness and grief that literally makes it hard to breathe.

This cruel, faintly-lit night is covered in a great storm taking the shores and seas. 

I sense it now, resonating deep within me beneath the hurt and the anger and the void.  I’m close to the middle, the eye of the storm.  It’s coming to get me.  It’s going to help me fly with its dangerous winds, cracks of thunder-cries and willow-branches of lightning striking.

I open my eyes.  I see the water has become an evil darkness before the ship, full of peril and mystery, mixed with wonder and tragedy.  Like the rain’s numbing therapy, I welcome it.

I lift my arms to shoulder length and height, holding them out like imitation wings of crucifixion and I tilt my chin skywards.  The icy-hard rain pelts my flesh, stings my skin, pricking it sharply to revive the nerve endings and remind them they’re still there before the numbness melds over.

The reminder and the revival are not wanted. It tells me I’m still breathing, that I’m still alive.  I don’t want to be. 

Not anymore.

Right then, the hurricane has set in motion, a thunderous god of storm and rage eager to destroy, and the wind tosses me about, rippling my shirts and hair before knocking me off balance.  My shoes slip off the metal railings, and then—straight forward and right a way—I fall.

No gravity.  I fall, fall, fall, and I’ve become weightless in this final flight of man.  The numbness doesn’t go away and the pain doesn’t leave me, but it will.  Very soon, it will.

I free-fall calmly, my arms still out to my shoulders as I rotate my hips so that I’ll land face-up before the plunge, down the haul of the ship.  In the background, a lighthouse gleam illuminates me, and just as it runs out I close eyes my again and make a clean splash into the foamy, ragged onyx mouth of the sea.

A change has occurred in the natural order of things, and I resume my fall in the frigid, lifeless ocean. My crucified wings won’t life me now.  The tides and currents, the vengence of Neptune, wraps me and tangles me in a new, aquatic gravity as my limbs try to bring me to the surface on their own accord.

Bubbles are trickling from the corners of my tight-shut lips as I enter a downward spiral, the pressure squeezing my chest.  I’m sinking to the bottom.  Nobody can save me now.  Nobody knows what I’ve done yet. I can’t swim to the surface because there is no up and down anymore; how can one stop this ending?

I can’t.  I can’t breathe.  I feel the spongy-oxygen tissues inside me popping with the force and the pressure, bursting in little splats inside my weighted chest.  This burning, this agony—Death’s final pain accompanies my final flight.

Accepting my fate as I continue allowing myself to soar downwards and downwards, I open my mouth slightly and more bubbles start pouring out just as water enters and makes this hurt worse. 

I surrender.  I let out a silent scream in the salt water, and my life and breath bubbles swarm in huge baubles and pods to the surface, in the direction presumed as up.  I open my eyes one last time to search the blurry darkness to create last-chance memory, and I see the shadows of whales beneath me diving down.

My eyes are blurring out the rest just as a final thought erases the whales:  A face.  Hers. 

Oh God, no.

The pain overtakes me.  Melancholy, helpless, and doomed, I gurgle my last water-filled breath into my worthless lungs, and I relax and float into endless, dreaming space.

--

Midnight. I think so, anyway.

Air rushes into my lungs, and I’m still alive.  It was all a dream, a hauntingly beautiful and vivid nightmare.  I take a few deep breaths to test the reality of awakeness, just as my eyelids flutter open to see that I’m lying in my bed, looking up at the ceiling postered with rock stars and action heroes.

I run a hand through my hair, rubbing my forehead as I mull over everything that had just happened to me in another world.  The images flicker across my mind, the things before the cold water and the sinking down down until I die.

I remember…  I was on a ship, a passenger out of many, going to some unknown destination on an unknown voyage.  People didn’t care about me.  They didn’t look away from their shimmery parties and wineglasses to watch whenever I decided to leave the room and go out to the deck, which was desolated.

My hands go from my face to the bedcovers, feeling the synthetic fibers as the memories continue coming back.

Knowing something the others didn’t know, I went to the bow of the ship.  Without even a final glance I had stepped up and, desperate to end my misery over everything that had happened and my treatment by others, I jumped. 

“Just to prove I knew how, yeah?”  My real-time voice sounds raspy from the remnants of the dream world still creeping over me.  My tongue flicks across the roof of my mouth, tasting a strange lingering of salt as though I really had been drowned in an angry sea.

Groggily and slightly disturbed from the dream, I sit up and feel the real world flip up with me as the blood comes rushing to my head.  Squinting through the blue-darkness, I check the digital clock beside me—12:14 a.m.—and receive a hugely painful bolt to my heart.

It’s the face, the one I saw before I succumbed, and it’s grinning at me in the picture of us together at the carnival last year. She’s grinning with me like she used to, her arms wrapped around my waist as we smiled at the camera.

I shudder as the memories I’ve been suppressing try to wriggle and worm and re-enter me, swallowing thickly and tasting more salty bitterness.  Having been a bit startled, my pulse races and my breathing becomes labored—a pain very much like death’s finale tumbles awkwardly from its hiding place in my heart, stabbing my guts with brutally severe hotness.  I feel sick and I wonder if I’m going to throw up all over my bed.

My ears start ringing and popping.  My brain feels rattled in its protective skull, which also feels gaped and damaged from this ordeal.

What’s left of her, of us, is that one photo…  That one photo will be my demise.

Anxious, I tear my fearful eyes away and I focus on the single window next to my bed on the otherside.  My window, admist see-through linen curtains, presents an unadulterated view of a fertile cliff being ravished by a vengeful surf, the frothy indigo waves lapping at the grass blades on top.  The rain’s coming down in speedy slants, hammering my windowpane in a fierce rhythm that rivals the urgency of my heartbeat.

I swallow some more, and I taste the salt again.  Memory flashes quickly, clashing with sense and thought and dreams.

The cliff.  The ocean. The fall.  No gravity.

Outside my window, calling me.  Calling me, the siren song. 

Calling me now.

Watching the storm outside, I bit my lip, my bleached-knuckles clenching my sweaty bed sheets, and I try steadying my heart rate and senseless mind before making my decision.

--

Into the ocean, end it all.






--
;I own this propery 100%.
Short story inspired from the story told in Blue October's emotive song, "Into the Ocean."
Complete.