Drowning

Drowning starts with no one noticing it, not even yourself. Until you feel yourself fully submerge to the depths below. Once you begin to sink, you forget how you came to be in the water in the first place, though that hardly matters now.

You find yourself sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss below. If you're lucky, you just don't know how to swim. However, most of the time you feel them clawing and wrapping at you. Their tentacles and teeth latching deep onto you pulling you further and further down.

When you drown, you drown alone. You can try to call out for help, but all that will be heard is the sound of the bubbles surfacing as you slowly start to run out of air. Air is the least of your concern, because even if you managed to break free from the monster's grasps, you still would have a long way back to the surface.

You start to get used to the darkness, the coldness, and the pressure of the cold murky water, as it starts to become your home. Once you've accepted that, you shift and change adapting, becoming someone unrecognizable, sinking further and deeper down.

Even if the monster decided to release you, you still would be left with your own tentacles to get used to. Even if you surfaced, even if you survived, whoever first saw you would scream and charge. So you learn to love the dark, to let it swallow you up whole.

Becoming the very thing that dragged you to the depths, is the only thing that will save you in the end. Drowning only takes a second, it's the second that you give up. In that second, everything is dark, in that second, everything is water. Once you submit, the water fills your lungs and your back starts to shift and change into the very monster that you struggle against.

You find yourself no longer able to even look yourself in the mirror, no longer able to draw any breath. Still feeling cold, and with the air that used to be in your lungs depleted. Breathing but not being able to inhale; that is what it means to drown...