Depth

When I am here in my bed, propped up against the wall, lights out, eyes unfocused, I can feel every shadow. I can feel every shadow that probes the darkness, every shadow that surfaces into perception from inky depths. I can feel the abyss creep up my bed, over my sheets, held at bay by the light of my computer screen, a non-dark island, a sanctuary. Or maybe I don’t want sanctuary. Maybe the island is a hindrance. Maybe I am stranded. Maybe I want to escape, jettison myself into the abyss and let the dark wash over me and surround me and cover my body and fill my ears and mouth.

The standard conception of death is a tunnel of light. I see a hand of darkness. A hand that rises up from underneath my bed, like a shark surfacing underneath a boat. The hand approaches the surface, breaks it’s plain, makes a fist around my bed. The fingers rise like bedposts, close like tree branches. The fist pulls my bed down, down into the absolute darkness that you can defeat if your eyes are closed tight enough. Tight enough that bubbles of colored light bounce and pop under your eyelids. Reds, purples, low intensity wavelengths. Death is water. Death is drowning. Death is depth and the resulting pressure. The goal, then, is that moment when you cannot hold your breath any longer, that moment where the part of your brain still wired for primal survival takes over and forces your mouth open, forces your muscles to contract and fill your lungs with water. Only instead of water your lungs fill with oxygen and you open your eyes and the bubbles are gone and you are no longer at the bottom of a dark ocean but rather on your bed, where you were in the first place, propped against the wall, lights out, eyes unfocused. But they are focused now. They are focused on the one point of light on the wall ahead, the one point of light broadcast from a needlepoint hole in the curtain. And this one point of light becomes a tunnel, a tunnel of light that leads to heaven or Eden or maybe just a library of memories of life up to this point. The goal now is to remember birth. Remember the transition from warm dark to bright cold. Remember placental fluid sucked from unused lungs, the first particles of real oxygen and how they stung fresh tissue. Death is drowning and life is that first breath after.