Drowning | Teen Ink

Drowning

November 6, 2023
By Anonymous

It's dark. It's cold. The water grips you with its spiny, winding fingers. There are two stages to drowning. When you are first plunged in, every inch of your body is fighting, wanting, needing to survive. Your ears are pounding due to the blood rushing into them. It’s as if your head is a jungle and every animal is violently trying to escape.  You frantically gasp for the little pockets of air there are. If the pain continues any longer, you will break. This is a much different feeling than the water that's engulfing you. It doesn't want to hurt you, merely welcome you to a place where there is no pain. After the pain subsides, your muscles loosen and your eyes start to close. The water grips you harder, wanting to pull you into the deepest depths and for those few moments, You just want to let it. 

But all of a sudden, a faint voice yells in the distance and two blurs just within arms reach pull you away from the spindling fingers. Pulling you back from the Darkness. But it is short lived because your eyes close involuntarily and your forced back.

Your eyes open to reveal you're laying in a decorated hospital room. The white sheets of the hospital bed have turned beige to match the damp peeling wallpaper and the blinding bright monitor beeps faster as you regain consciousness. Walls are lined with pictures of happy patients and happier doctors, almost as if they have something to hide. As you fail to remember how you got here, the nervous doctor next to you calls for someone and skribbles something down on his clipboard. Not even a second later, a middle aged lady in a brown skirt, pink shirt, and short hair, flings open the weathered out door. Her long, orange handbag promptly flies against the wall before returning to her side. As you glance at her, she immediately throws her arms around you. From between her shoulder and head, your eyes seize, before they eventually close and a single tear rolls down your cheek. You are safe now. 


The author's comments:

My whole set piece is an allegory for how you can feel when you have depression. I represent this feeling by comparing it to the physical feeling you get when you drown and how it feels to get saved just before you die. The second paragraph shows how you would feel after going through a traumatic situation; Almost as if you're seeing everything for the first time. For this set piece, I tried to play around with a second person point of view, which you can see very clearly throughout the entire set piece. Overall I like the way I paint the picture of drowning and sensory blindness.


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