Christie Flemming 11/16/04
Going Under
One moment in time, suspended in my mind as a slow-motion dream in which nothing existed but myself and the water around me.
As my body was thrown under by the force of the wave, the pull of the undertow - I could feel the water filling my nose as my feet were ripped off the sand of the ocean floor, the breath being torn from my throat like a fleeting wind, all the air sucked out. Words caught in my mouth as water filled me, never getting a chance to be heard. There was nothing I could do to change what was happening. I was helpless.
Tumbling, being tossed by the rhythms and whirls of the sea, I watched in sudden serenity as chaotic whirls of white bubbles filled my view. The ocean swirled around me in mad patterns that made no sense. Somehow it seemed to me time was lagging. But, unlike most near-death experiences, the life I had once been a part of did not flash before my eyes. No thoughts ran through my head as God’s peace caressed my mind. Blissful blankness filled me. I only stared in wonder and awe at the cloud of water it seemed I was now a part of.
As someone who has been holding tight for days on end finally breathes a filling, releasing sigh of relief, just so my body and mind relaxed, and I forgot about the danger I was in. In reality I was being thrown this way and that, the ocean not caring about me or even knowing I was there, a tiny spec amid its vast expanse - but to myself I was soaring, sleeping, floating.
As I was in that moment, surrounded by blue chaos for fifteen seconds, I thought of nothing. Can you imagine not thinking of anything at all? It’s almost impossible to clear our minds and become completely at rest, but that’s exactly what I did.
The fear didn’t come until I broke the surface again, spluttering, my silent ease a piece of glass being shattered, awakening all my senses to here and now, telling me of the peril I had just escaped. My bubble of security and nothingness popped, along with the calm I had just experienced. As my lungs were once again filled with oxygen, gasping in all the air around me, my ears were filled, too, with what seemed to me more noise than I had ever heard before. The sound of the surf and the seagulls filling my mind with incomprehensible clamor, my brain overloaded, and as the sound increased, I once again lost control. It seemed I had just entered the true chaos - this is what it sounded and felt like. I wiped my eyes, but all I saw was a blur. I was filled with confusion and panic. I didn’t know what was going on, what to do next, as all humans feel when they’ve lost control.
As I stumbled toward shore, all my strength knocked out of me, each foot dragged against the rocky bottom: the jagged passageway to my refuge amidst the sand. ‘Almost there’, I thought, and finally collapsed on the shore, each limb fully drained of any energy. All I was capable of now was to think - remember. I recalled, as I always will, watching unsuspectingly as my father and I bodysurfed the giants of Misquamicut Beach, waiting for another swell to come my way. Being suddenly encompassed by water, first pouring down my head, then slamming into my back like a thousand tons of steel propelling a train. It will forever be engraved in my mind, an epitaph on the sandstone of my memory, an insight on human frailty revealed in later years.
Strange, isn’t it, how the danger didn’t feel real until it had already passed? As if my reactions reversed: During the turmoil I was completely calm, almost relieved or happy, and once the danger had ended, the time when I should have been glad it was over, I was instead filled with dread… for something that had already occurred. Shouldn’t it have been the other way around? I guess that’s the way it is when we come face to face with our own vulnerability and powerlessness.
No comments:
Post a Comment