The Ocean of Sadness

If sadness was an ocean I would drowned at seventeen. As a child I played on the beaches always glancing at the black sea, watching every wave swallow parts of the golden sand, dragging it down into its frozen depths. At twelve the water was already at my ankles, assuring me it was just a bad day and that tomorrow the beach would be glowing and sandy again. But days became weeks, weeks became months , months turned into years and I hadn't noticed that I was dragged out to the middle of the abyss. I was choking for air, every breath was painfully swallowed with a cup of frigid salty water, burning down my throat and numbing me to the veins that began to pump a dark coldness through out me. My body was a shivering breathless being, I was no longer living, I was merely surviving. Until I started to spiral out of control, I was bleeding from my wrists and hips, trying to feel something in my numb state as I awaited the sharks of death to find me and drag me down to the dystopia at the bottom of the sea. As the darkness began to surround me, I looked up to the sky to beg them to send someone to help, but I knew that no one would come because who's going to save you when you're so deep you can't even find yourself. But the small lights I saw in the sky mirrored something in my heart. The small light of paper thin hope that has kept me afloat, the firefly that appeared in the dark meadow of my soul. I began to tread again, breaking through the glass like top of the water, mapping my way back with the stars to that beach I once knew as a child, I knew it would take a great deal of strength and I would want to give up but I had to just keep swimming. As I washed up on the small but still warm beach of my past, I was broken and gasping for a breath that no longer hurt to breathe in, my lungs began to remember that sweet taste of warm air. Even though the water was lapping at my feet telling me there would still be bad days ahead, I just yelled back that days can no longer touch me because if sadness was an ocean then I would be an Olympic swimmer.