Everything is muted, not quiet - just unreachable.
The world presses in like water, thick and slow, but I don't resist, there is no fight left, no care.
I wake up, though I don't remember sleeping, my eyes open because they always do, I get out of bed because not doing so feels like too much of a decision.
Everything is weight, even the air feels like it presses against me, heavy, slow, indifferent.
I move through rooms I don't see, touch things I don't feel, my hands do what they've always done - lift, pull, carry, clean - but they don't belong to me.
People speak, their mouths move, their eyes wait, but the words don't reach me, I nod, I pretend, I say just enough to keep the mask from slipping.
Inside, there's no voice to answer them, only the hum of a silence that never ends, I'm underwater, not drowning - that would suggest struggle, there is no struggle left, no panic, no urgency, only stillness.
No one can see it, the surface looks intact, they see functioning, they see survival, but inside, I am a thousand miles from shore, floating in nothing, suspended between thoughts that never quite form.
I forget things constantly, not out of carelessness - out of emptiness, out of disconnection, everything drifts by like seaweed in a current, unnoticed, untouched, unimportant.
I eat, but the taste doesn't land.
I sleep, but I wake up tired.
I speak, but the words feel borrowed, like I'm quoting someone I used to be.
There are no sharp edges, no loud colors, no highs, no lows, just the flatline rhythm of existence with no pulse behind it.
People ask how I'm doing, I say "fine", because the truth isn't even painful anymore - it's just too far away.
There is this numbness that is even deeper than pain, not the absence of feeling, but the burial of it, everything still exists beneath me, I think - but I have no strength left to dive for it.
I want to care, I remember what it felt like to be awake in my own skin, to want something, to be pulled by desire, moved by grief or cracked open by joy.
But now, I just float, eyes open, hands busy, mind elsewhere, if I cry, it's not from sadness.
I am still here, but not really.
I am underwater, and I don't know if I'm waiting to drown or hoping the surface remembers me.
