Deep Waters
For when you're looking...
You never asked me what else lingered. And in my haste to stand on solid ground, I never quite told you. I never quite gave you the recount of what else I carry with me.
Like the unshakable feeling of walking on thin ice – the creaking, the cracking, the visible fractures expanding with every footfall. The fear of the ice giving in, the fear of the frozen dark waters underneath consuming me whole, inhabited by someone else’s monsters of the deep. The apprehension, like a living, breathing creature, sucking the air out and exhaling black, oppressive smoke that made it impossible to see or even breathe.
There’s an omnipresence to it– it echoes in the deepest recesses of my consciousness. Well and truly embedded, that I am robbed of any certainty as to my recoil – is it the memory, or the actual sound? Is it a treacherous footstep, or the imagination of one? Has my foot truly gone through – is it touching those dark waters – or is it just that odd precipice like a night start or a lucid dream?
And there it was, a sense of dread you instilled. A clamping, silencing proverbial hand, because so much as a breath threatened to break the ice…
Yet it broke anyway. Not fractured by my weight, nor by a whisper of an exhale. It was the things that lurked beneath, rearing their heads. I’d glimpsed them, ghost-like, through the thinnest ice. I’d heard their wails. I knew they existed as surely as I knew I existed. And now I saw them, free at long last.
They’d been ravenous, and now they demand to be fed.
Do you truly begrudge me the aversion to being cannibalized by your monsters?
Deep Waters
For when you're looking...
You never asked me what else lingered. And in my haste to stand on solid ground, I never quite told you. I never quite gave you the recount of what else I carry with me.
Like the unshakable feeling of walking on thin ice – the creaking, the cracking, the visible fractures expanding with every footfall. The fear of the ice giving in, the fear of the frozen dark waters underneath consuming me whole, inhabited by someone else’s monsters of the deep. The apprehension, like a living, breathing creature, sucking the air out and exhaling black, oppressive smoke that made it impossible to see or even breathe.
There’s an omnipresence to it– it echoes in the deepest recesses of my consciousness. Well and truly embedded, that I am robbed of any certainty as to my recoil – is it the memory, or the actual sound? Is it a treacherous footstep, or the imagination of one? Has my foot truly gone through – is it touching those dark waters – or is it just that odd precipice like a night start or a lucid dream?
And there it was, a sense of dread you instilled. A clamping, silencing proverbial hand, because so much as a breath threatened to break the ice…
Yet it broke anyway. Not fractured by my weight, nor by a whisper of an exhale. It was the things that lurked beneath, rearing their heads. I’d glimpsed them, ghost-like, through the thinnest ice. I’d heard their wails. I knew they existed as surely as I knew I existed. And now I saw them, free at long last.
They’d been ravenous, and now they demand to be fed.
Do you truly begrudge me the aversion to being cannibalized by your monsters?