Enlightenment and Nachos

There was a crushing weight against my chest. I’d felt it for so long that I only just noticed it was dissipating finally. It was a dark place; to begin with, you had thought it brightened. You were aware even way back then that there was no time to worry about anything else. All your blind and senseless kicking and silent pleading against the forces of physics and the strength of your entire body not to panic stood in the way of another set of marvelous sunsets, sandwiching hours of lonely attempts to justify another attempt to be proud of successfully reaching a sunset and little else in my life -however comfortably and well I lived. No, that place was dark, and kicking was a habit born of an urge to survive. To find a reason to be here.
In front of that bonfire, you thought you had found the light. The purpose is not just a reason but a good one…  but people are people, not reasons. And as the darkness begins to disperse into the limitless void beyond my concern, the change in environment does indicate that the mere effort of a senseless and seemingly useless attempt at saving your own life had, in point-of-fact, been at least POINTING in the right direction. Or so you hope. As the darkness, having wrapped itself around you for so long knows you all too well. You find that having nothing else to crawl under to hide from the persistent sun millions of miles above, trying to pierce such unfathomable depths that darkness seems to have crawled inside of you as it seeps into the edges of your vision. Those spots floating around the center of your vision are not reflections of light under waves from nearby but not anywhere close to the surface, but from the oxygen deprivation while the numbing cold crushes every individual muscle fiber’s will to continue to exert the force demanded of it and simply surrender to the waves rather than forcing them to keep clawing wildly toward what you have only just realized was the surface.
When you are drowning, the body’s first instinct is to panic! This is because you are about to have a very uncomfortable few minutes ahead of you and are unable to do the one thing that would help you calm down and concentrate while every automatic system in your body is forcibly refused the right to operate, which upsets a lot of most peoples ability to rationalize that what they could really use in this moment, what with all things being equal, was a breath of air. The reason the word ‘fresh’ had yet to enter the idea is that it was in the way of the very much-needed air your body swore it knew precisely how to pull out of the very atmosphere if only you would relax your jaw just slightly further exhale all that held breath out and take, diaphragm flexing, lung-full of air. Since the brain of most humans is nestled safely inside of a skull that’s encased  in such a way allows a remarkable amount of information to come into it  to be processed, not only can it not process all of this information at once  but will prioritize those automatic functions meant to (after billions of years of successful evolution being designed to)keep you alive over that of, say, the miles of ocean between any functioning respiratory orifice possess and any breathable air…

 At some point, you lose the sensation in your extremities, unsure if hands and feet remember the consequences of failure; what little of your vision that is left unblurred or shadowed succumbs to whatever darkness you hope you are still heading out of and fade to black as well as your brain, in an act of malicious compliance has begun shutting off things that don’t need the oxygen you are rather quickly running out of. Blind and fighting off panic with both hands, the only compromise is to start exhaling slowly while fighting your body’s designed nervous system that would demand an immediate resupply – again without checking to make sure it was safe enough to do so.  Trying to remember the complex series of movements for efficiently propelling yourself through the body becomes difficult while simultaneously wracked with convulsions. As if your body was unaware that screaming pain in your chest meant you might expire, and soon.
The only way to tell whether your eyes are open is the stinging of salt water. Long after your vision fades and your muscles begin to give out, you realize you don’t feel the crushing weight anymore or the exhaustion. There is no pain or aching, soreness, or even fatigue. You did your best, making it farther than you even knew possible… You tried not to quit, but nothing is left to give to the effort. So you do Crying salty tears into a sea already filled with your regrets…
Then a crash. With all the force of a trainwreck, no louder than a hiss. It was not heard but felt in the chest, so it was taught from strain as to be a drum. Confused, your hands swipe at open air, delirious enough to worry about falling upwards. Your brain, having finally flipped every switch it could to save you, now must repeat the process in reverse and quickly.
The sound of a gasping man in the ocean might as well be a whisper in a hurricane for all the signaling it does to anything other than your lungs that something is alive out here. There is much sputtering and hacking as worn-out lungs remember the series of steps to take another mouth full of air and salty foam.

When I say you are like a breath of fresh air, I do not mean that lightly. Having run into you may have saved my life.
Thank you.