Breathing
Every now and then, I can feel it coming on. The panic. The fear. The anguish. Waves crashing into the shore, cutting into the sand with nails of foam, ripping and dragging a layer of the Earth's skin deep, deep, deeper. My mind is that beach, worn and torn until there is not a grain of sand left above the water.
I try to breathe, but that water suffocates. It invades my mouth, my lungs, my skin, my every pore. It drowns, it seeps, it drains. It's there and it's not in a moment. Crash, crash, crash. Breaking my spirit, my hopes, my dreams.
Not that there were very many left to break, but still.
I want to scream, I want to shout... And I can't. It's that same water bringing me down that submerges my voice, my cries.
Breathe.
I tell myself to breathe.
In, out. In, out.
Nose, mouth. Nose, mouth.
I tell myself to breathe, and it works.
Sometimes.
Other times, my mouth doesn't find the surface in time and I wake up, washed up. Washed up on an island, deserted. Alone.
Always alone.
Crying is second to breathing. That works too. Almost always, that one does. The time it takes varies.
Back when I still regularly went to libraries, I'd read about ancient civilizations. And I do mean ancient. The kind of civilizations that still had concepts of biologically determined families.
I never understood that part, but the ideas of "mothers" always did appeal to me. A strong person to carry you from infancy to adulthood, to hold you tight when things got rough. The kind of person who would explain the hard truths and the easy lies.
The kind of person that might teach you to breathe, or cry.
Or swim.