Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
IT TAKES APPROXIMATELY THREE MINUTES to drown. Seven for certain death. Once you start to inhale water, the body triggers an auto-response reaction to close its air passages. Everything begins to shut down. The body will struggle for air but the primal need to breathe will not be granted because the airways are blocked. Usually, by this point, you might be flailing above water. In a very short time you will submerge, and within minutes you will die unless a rescue is made and efforts to resuscitate you commence.
By the two minute mark, Sawyer feels her lungs burning, begging for air, but she holds on, determined to make it to the third. Submerged underwater, Earth is a million miles away and she is a cluster of cells in the dark again, an embryo suspended in lifeless stasis, an only child of the only universe its ever known. Submerged underwater, she hears nothing but the metronome of her heartbeat pounding in her ears, the blood in her veins roaring with the fury of a storming ocean, the water sloshing around the ceramic bathtub. Beyond the door of the bathroom she's barricaded herself in, the world outside this throbbing ventricle is disconnected, of fractured pieces of memory and fragments of distorted sounds. Faint sounds plugging her ears, homage to the water pipes running through the walls of their apartment building, the neighbour's record player crackling through the white noise, a bustling relic of her family getting ready for dinner, muffled by the bathwater and the blood rushing to her temples.
In this emotionless cavity, the sounds from the outside perforating the tranquil on the inside are mere echoes, inconsequential reminders of a before and an after she will not suffer. Not here, at least. Here, she is untethered, a lone particle with no sense of gravity floating in the middle of space, unburdened with mortality and humanity and this moment of quiet in the chaos, of the water being louder than the thoughts in her head, of existing outside of her ceaseless brain feels like the only moment of peace she's ever known.
For a secret second she wonders if she should try staying under until the seventh minute. If dying from drowning might put her in this thoughtless state forever. A state where she feels none of the anger prowling in its flesh prison, a tiger too big for its cage, sharpening its claws, ready to tear the Earth apart with its canines once the chains slack and the bars slip. Solve all her problems at once. Revulsion racks her spine and she chokes on the air she can't breathe.
Curled up in foetal position, Sawyer presses one hand against the side of the tub to steady herself, anchoring her body down down down. The other hand clamps tenaciously over her nose with marked resolve. Her eyes are closed and behind her eyelids she counts the seconds while her insides start to sear with a blinding heat. Hold on hold on hold on. Twenty more seconds. Twenty more seconds and she'll finally break her current record. Twenty seconds and she will allow herself to resurface.
Three minutes. There contained the savage discipline she's been working towards this entire summer, honing the brutal craft of curbing herself from succumbing to the primal need to obey the body, even if it hurts, even if it the black tinged her vision and she slips away and, anyhow, what's so terrible about slipping away? Moving between a topography of universes, dimensions, parallels, inhibiting new bodies, new words to live by, new tongues to shape your person with, that doesn't sound like such a tragedy after all. Adventure is what keeps the soul alive and when you've been grounded for a whole two months and three days, slipping between circadian universes fabricated from the domesticated homespun routine of life—like a child might imagine her dolls to be animate, the air pouring out of the plastic pot to be tea fit for service at the garden party—is all you have and all there will be.
