It was this cold, suffocating feeling that washed over me, this stillness that wasn’t calming but strangling me, wrapping its icy, death-like fingers around my neck. I couldn’t breathe, lifting my hands to claw at my throat. I needed oxygen. I needed air in my lungs.
I was in the center of a frozen ocean, drowning, shards of ice stabbing into my fragile body and tearing me open. I was being pulled deeper until blackness consumed me, washed over me… claimed every single inch of my body until I was nothing more.
Bleakness.
Emptiness.
Nothing.
I opened my eyes, blinked once, twice, staring at the ceiling, counting water stains above me. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t, that darkness still washing over me, still having that stranglehold around my throat. It was a vice.
And then I gasped, as if my body realized I wasn’t dreaming any longer, as if it realized I was in the here and now. I wasn’t back there; I wasn’t with the darkness and emptiness that had been my companion for so long.