Drowning and What It Can Do

I've always considered drowning to be the worst way you could die, but I've come to see it in a different perspective.

I've been told that when you're drowning, your body activates the mammalian diving reflex, which shunts as much blood from your extremities as possible and sends it to your heart and brain. Because of the lack of carbon dioxide, you involuntarily draw in breath, causing your lungs to fill with water. But when they do, your throat spasms to try and seal your airways to your lungs. And when water replaces oxygen, your body would begin to black out, and you'll become unconscious, and you will die soon after.

I've always considered drowning to be the most that you would ever feel scared or alone. But what I've learned is that your body does everything to keep you alive and well: it sends blood to your heart and brain, and your throat spasms to keep the water from your lungs, and in the end, it will show your life before your eyes to give you something beautiful to look at before your brain shuts down.

You don't always love yourself, and you don't always want to live, but your body always loves you, and it always wants you to live.

And when it fails you, it whisper through the waves in your lungs, saying, "Forgive me, for I have failed you."

But you know that you only failed yourself. Your body did not deserve this. It was simply at the wrong soul at the wrong time. Your body is the puppy that whimpers when it sees you cry. Your body is the clothes you were when you're crying so hard that you forget to breathe, and you rip your clothes off in hopes of remembering the feeling of not being constricted in hopes of it getting easier to breathe again in hopes of holding on for just a minute longer.

"Forgive me, for I have failed you."

Your body has sacrificed more than what you think: every bruise, every scratch, every broken bone, every shove and kick and elbow and every stubbed toe and sore fingers when you can't stop writing about how much you hated

your body,

every time you hated the way your stomach rolls over your jeans or every time you hated how your breasts weren't exactly the same size, or every time you grabbed that little bit of underarm fat or your thick thighs.

Your body always loved you, even when you couldn't love it back.

And when you hear it whisper through the waves in your lungs, saying, "Forgive me, for I have failed you," your last breath, the last bubbles to the surface, your last saltwater truth will whisper, through the waves in your lungs,

"No, forgive me, body, for I have failed you."