The water begins to coil around her, deep blue and merciless. The cold chokes the warmth from her body. She struggles but her brain is giving off sparks instead of sending signals and she flails desperately in the abyss, her eyes opening and closing like the gills of a fish. Her own hair floats around her, surrounding her in a brown cocoon far more suffocating than the effect of air being snatched from her lungs. She swims up up up to the surface, or so she thinks. In reality, she is pushing against the current, down down down to her own destruction.
Her hand scrapes something rough and slimy and she grabs at it, blinking often enough only to take brief, cloudy snapshots of her surroundings. Sand. Ice. Weeds. Water. There’s no sound, just the blood pounding in her ears, struggling to pump through her body without the oxygen to push it through. Her lungs are burning, her eyes are stinging, her limbs are weightless. She runs her hands over her face, her fingers stiff and rebelling against her will. She can’t breathe air so she breathes water.
The water is gone. It evaporates around her and everything is replaced with a vast nothingness peppered only with small balls of light. Space. She is in space. She looks down at a star. She is floating above it. The star is moving, constantly tearing itself apart and rebuilding the damage done. She wants to touch it, she wants to hold it, she wants to be it. She needs to know her place in the world and now her head is clear, not filled with water or oxygen or ideas.
There is no sound in space; it’s a vacuum. There is no sound underwater. Under gallons and gallons of water stacked up on top of each other like a pile of textbooks sitting on a table except that she is the table. She feels the pressure of space, the pressure of water, the waves stroking her cheeks, the cold liquid invading her lungs. She reaches out to grab the star but something pulls her back, breaking her surroundings into a thousand little pieces and shattering the silence.
She is on the beach of a lake with people hovering over her. She is slammed into her body and her chest hurts like someone has been pounding on it and her eyes are fluttering like little butterflies and she wants to remember the stars but she looks up and only sees a cloudy sky.
The memories are slipping from her mind. They are forcefully pushed away by the air filling her lungs and the pale sunlight on her skin and feeling of wet sand under her fingers. The nothingness is filled with the sound of voices as the vacuum reverses and spits concepts and substantial things back into her head. She cries from the loss of it because there’s nothing else she can do. She has been saved. She is a tragedy.