Swimming in thoughts; Drowning in memories.

The aestival sky is new and blue, powdered with clouds suspended high in their avidity to watch the day.  I can look up to find the faces in them.  I do so, and smile back.  The in-ground pool is in the shape of a lima-bean; the water is cucumber green from the chlorination.  People are swimming in refreshment.  I do not know any of them, but I recognize the game they are playing.  A young lifeguard stands out at the warm concrete crusts, tossing pennies in the deep end like wishes in a well.  The others dive down to find them, to make them come true.  Turning to me with his glazed physique and whistle-charmed necklace, he throws a large handful of coins into the water beneath us.  Standing on the edge, he beckons me to go and follow them. He smiles as he blows the whistle.  I dive in too fast too notice.

The water hits like a head-on collision.  In a quick burst of light, like the segway to a flashback or a near death experience, I find myself smacked into another dimension of weightlessness and serenity.  The water is calm and clear; the sun at my back, warming the natatorial womb.  The pool floor is blank, freckled with the shining reflections of copper.  Twinkling they sink like falling stars.  Resting at the bottom in Cartesian order, they are perfectly plotted in symmetrical array.  I plot the coordinates I choose to take from.  I swim down for the one datum-centered at the origin. 

As I submerge toward the white, the water pressure constricts me like the stomach of a snake.  I am smothered by the surroundings, every inch down and the hold grows tighter.  My whole body is strangled as it heavily treads towards the benthic layer.  I try to hold the prize in my site, but my head is fixed solid with titanium in a forward position.  Because of this, I cannot see where I am going.  I can only feel the surmounting compression and the fluid filling my nostrils.  I’m not sure how much further it is to the floor, so I swim down with my arms out, like a blind man preying to an upside-down god. 

I yearn to feel the solid concrete at my fingertips.  I feel I must be close, for I’ve been swimming for so long. I’ve lost so much air already; my lungs are growing hungry. The veins in my head are condensing; I can feel each one like coral around my brain.  They clench up from the pressure.  Water fills the hollow back of my skull.  It barges into my head, like a tactless thief to steal my soul.  The sutchered doors of my skin burst open, and blood and hell pour out volcanically.  Bits of brain float around me like curdling milk in a sour acid.   The aquamarine color becomes a puncturing crimson; I watch as the blood washes through my eyes.  Pennies are falling up from what has become the bottom of my world.  As they levitate by, I reach my hands out to seize them.  They fall right into my eyes, and upon closing them I see white.

In most people’s nightmares they are chased by monsters, or pursued by elaborate fantasies of fear. In mine I am haunted by what I could once enjoy.