Deep end

He described the experience as being a bit like diving into a swimming pool. There was that awful nervous tension before hand, a tightening in the stomach, the inability to think straight and the feeling of time both rushing by and crawling past. The edge of vision was blurred and concentration was gone and wiped clean like a memory. Once that had passed a steel like determination set in and from the edge of one element the dive into another took place. It felt like a punch hitting hard into the abdomen and passing straight through. The thing was it wasn’t a dive and swim and out again into a dry and welcoming towel, it was complete immersion, staying under the water, breathing, surviving and living a fractured model of normal life in that foreign environment. Moving and breathing in this strange constricting world deep below the water, starved of oxygen but still at peace.

Moving was odd, all slow motion and reflections and crashing images from bits of the imagination. The breathing eventually settled while staying still wrapped up in the water seemed the best thing to do, to steady the nerves and allow a settlement, allow the waters to cover over and as far as you can in deep water, breath normally, slowly, in measured lungfuls that would allow some type of progression to take place eventually. Allow yourself to be this other self for the time being. This other self in this other world, in at the deep end.