All the Other Colors Drowned

Prologue

First came panic.

I didn't know how I had lost control of where I was, but my feet were no longer reaching the ground, and my brain immediately sounded danger alarms inside my head.

As I struggled furiously, trying to hold on to something that didn't exist, I was also trying to find solid ground. The sea and sky had merged into a single blue image, the sun reflected off the water directly into my eyes, and I had no idea how to get back to shore.

Everyone told me it all happened too quickly, but for me, it could have easily gone on for hours.

The waves kept coming and throwing me under, and just when I thought they were dragging me closer to safety, they actually pushed me further and further away, until I was no longer part of the rest of the landscape, and my mother noticed that there was something wrong.

When I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get out of there, seeing the endless, dark bottom of the ocean and knowing that no one could see me, I worried about holding my breath as long as I could. I was focused, my lungs were inflated with a good supply of oxygen, and I stopped moving.

Of course, I wasn't calm. That's when the shock began. My muscles had practically prevented me from moving any part of my body, I felt like a statue, a person trapped inside a block of cement.

Due to the situation, my eyes no longer cared about the salt in the water, and I could almost see everything under there clearly. My vision was turning into a tunnel, my heart was hammering in my chest like it was going to jump out, and now my brain was desperately telling me to breathe. But I wasn't going to do that. I needed to live. I was only eleven years old, I had many things yet to live, I couldn't die there.

When you don't obey your head, however, it does everything for you. I don't know if it's instinct, but in this situation, my brain had two pieces of information:

We will die from excess carbon dioxide in the blood;

We will fill our lungs with water.

Option two was less bad.

Finally, without my permission, the spasmodic breathing opened the doors for water to enter my lungs. For this reason, my first instinct was to try and vomit up the water, but this only caused more to come in. I had lost any sense of whether I was inhaling or exhaling, my stomach felt heavy, my torso burned like it was on fire, and, finally, nothingness.

And, oddly enough, nothing wasn't much more comforting.