Love and the Sea and Everything in Between

chapter twenty-two

I'm slipping.

It's like I'm drowning in this ocean that once made me feel so endless, but now I see the end. I see the shadows and the cold in its depths. It's like my stomach is made of lead and it's just dragging me. Deeper and deeper, I go.

I'm drowning. The water fills my lungs so full I feel like they might burst.

This is my life, now.

The days are a blur. I think it's been a week since that Sunday. I don't know anymore. I've stopped attending my classes. I've locked myself in my room. Thankfully, my roommate is gone so I don't have to try to put on that fatal mask for him.

At some point I decide to go shower. I check my phone and see that it's 10:17AM, Saturday February 13th. I toss it on my bed. Why do I need to know the day or the time or even the year? We spend so much of our lives categorizing everything by these numbers and they're meaningless. We do it all just so that we feel we have a hold of time.

But the thing is, time is a wild, boundless thing and it can never be defined by any one man. Time is the master of man. Man is not the master of time.

I pull my towel from around my waist and hang it on the hook outside the shower stall. I step inside and turn the water on. I don't bother adjusting the temperature. Instead, I let the ice-cold water cascade over my entire body, numbing me, freezing me.

It doesn't matter. It never mattered.

At first, I shiver. But as I stand under the freezing water, I grow used to it. Isn't that usually the way it goes? After a while, the numbness just... becomes normal. It becomes right.

I think I was right to believe that people like me don't get to live life. We only get to exist.

I think I was right when I told Professor Garcia that I'm a hurricane and I affect everyone around me. But at least before, I knew what I did. It was either, I was too much of a burden, or I was too moody, or I was too challenging, or I was too quiet. I could never be good enough.

So that is what I became, I guess: the guy who was never good enough, the guy who was too broken to be loved.

People like me get left behind and forgotten and abandoned and we never get an explanation. People leave us behind and don't bother to tell us why and we end up living our lives wondering what we did wrong, waiting for closure. But we don't get closure.

We don't deserve it.

We get to exist. We are the participators, the spectators.

For us, there is nothing more.

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