Submersion
Florence Onyango
Florence Onyango
I can breathe underwater if I stay still and don’t open my mouth. I’m lying on the seabed on a blanket of moss. The weeds’ caress is sweeter than a lover’s touch as it brushes across my bare body. Not a real lover’s touch, no. But like the one you imagine when you read a romance. When it wraps itself around my legs and arms, I feel wanted.
I’ll tell you how I got here in case you’re wondering, but only if you promise not to try this. You see, the sea does not love equally, so not everyone can learn to breathe underwater.
This all happened because of trash. My trash. I was a hoarder of all sorts of things. Nobody’s born a hoarder—or as my positive affirmation group taught me to say—a collector. Nobody wants to be a collector of trash—or as the art group I followed put it: sometimes, art is trash. And other times, trash is art.
What I’m trying to say is, I was a bad, bad, bad case of a barnacle-infested turtle. I call it a barnacle because the good doctor metaphorically explained it as such. Traumas are like barnacles in the way they attach themselves to us. If we don’t treat them, they will fester until we can’t function anymore, is what he said. I didn’t listen to him until the scale showed me I was carrying 200kg of barnacles. More than double my weight.
I may or may not have read it somewhere that seawater cleanses all the way through to the soul—can you see where this is going? I didn’t mean to end up lying here, on the seabed. I just wanted to soak for a while but the current got a hold of me. I was so heavy with all these barnacles; I just sunk and sunk.
Things are strange underwater. I can see people above me when they peer into the sea. Their faces elongate and squish as if they are accordions played by the waves. When they speak to me, all I hear is chub-li chub-li—know the sound, right? Drops dripping on water? That sound. That’s all I hear when the world of air collides with the world undersea.
The sea itself has no sound of its own. All there is, is a pressure that swathes you. When someone from the land reaches out to me, the pressure feels like I’m toothpaste being squeezed out of its tube. The rest of the time, the pressure feels like a silent scream.
If you want to learn how to breathe underwater, you have to possess the kind of mind that will believe your nostrils are gills. The first few times, I had to come up for air frequently. The sea loves me; it would carry me up to the surface and after I inhaled so deeply my lungs could explode, it rolled over me and pulled me back down to the seabed to be embraced by the weeds once again. I stayed submerged longer and longer until the world above became suffocating, poisonous air.
Being submerged is the closest I can ever get to flying. I lie here, drifting endlessly. It doesn’t matter if I have barnacles more than triple my weight; everything is weightless undersea. Everything drifts and floats and suspends. Nothing cuts or stabs or grazes. Everything glides and slithers and brushes.
I belong to the sea now. I will lie here until the barnacles wither away, until skin scales and sheds, until my bones become one with the reef. Then, I will be reborn and I will rejoin the world above the sea and I will forget that I can breathe underwater.
I’ll tell you how I got here in case you’re wondering, but only if you promise not to try this. You see, the sea does not love equally, so not everyone can learn to breathe underwater.
This all happened because of trash. My trash. I was a hoarder of all sorts of things. Nobody’s born a hoarder—or as my positive affirmation group taught me to say—a collector. Nobody wants to be a collector of trash—or as the art group I followed put it: sometimes, art is trash. And other times, trash is art.
What I’m trying to say is, I was a bad, bad, bad case of a barnacle-infested turtle. I call it a barnacle because the good doctor metaphorically explained it as such. Traumas are like barnacles in the way they attach themselves to us. If we don’t treat them, they will fester until we can’t function anymore, is what he said. I didn’t listen to him until the scale showed me I was carrying 200kg of barnacles. More than double my weight.
I may or may not have read it somewhere that seawater cleanses all the way through to the soul—can you see where this is going? I didn’t mean to end up lying here, on the seabed. I just wanted to soak for a while but the current got a hold of me. I was so heavy with all these barnacles; I just sunk and sunk.
Things are strange underwater. I can see people above me when they peer into the sea. Their faces elongate and squish as if they are accordions played by the waves. When they speak to me, all I hear is chub-li chub-li—know the sound, right? Drops dripping on water? That sound. That’s all I hear when the world of air collides with the world undersea.
The sea itself has no sound of its own. All there is, is a pressure that swathes you. When someone from the land reaches out to me, the pressure feels like I’m toothpaste being squeezed out of its tube. The rest of the time, the pressure feels like a silent scream.
If you want to learn how to breathe underwater, you have to possess the kind of mind that will believe your nostrils are gills. The first few times, I had to come up for air frequently. The sea loves me; it would carry me up to the surface and after I inhaled so deeply my lungs could explode, it rolled over me and pulled me back down to the seabed to be embraced by the weeds once again. I stayed submerged longer and longer until the world above became suffocating, poisonous air.
Being submerged is the closest I can ever get to flying. I lie here, drifting endlessly. It doesn’t matter if I have barnacles more than triple my weight; everything is weightless undersea. Everything drifts and floats and suspends. Nothing cuts or stabs or grazes. Everything glides and slithers and brushes.
I belong to the sea now. I will lie here until the barnacles wither away, until skin scales and sheds, until my bones become one with the reef. Then, I will be reborn and I will rejoin the world above the sea and I will forget that I can breathe underwater.
Florence is a Kenyan in a love-hate relationship with writing. She is also a communications and media blah, blah, blah when she's in the hating phasing but she'll always come back to writing. Her short story "Nyar Nam" was published in the 2015 Short Story Day Water Anthology.