Musical accompaniment: BMTH - Drown
My dive computer reads 30m below the surface of the Andaman Sea, my knees kicking up clouds of silt as they hit the bottom, and I can't breathe.
I've just back-rolled off a dinghy in tandem with Matthias, a synchronicity perfected through dozens of buddied dives, dozens of kilometres off the coast of Khao Lak, Thailand, and fallen headfirst into the peaceful silence of the blue. As the bottom rises up toward me I take a breath to add buoyancy to my torso, throw my hands out in an aqua-brake, tuck knees to my chest and flip over my centre-of-mass to settle neatly at the bottom and wait whilst the group reassembles. The cold, dry, decompressing air tickles my throat and I choke on a cough, then another, and another. Biting down on the mouthpiece I realise that no matter how hard I draw down I can't seem to fill my lungs with air.
I breathe in as deep as I can, fighting the pressure constricting my chest, and it's not enough.
I'm breathing hard, struggling to bring my heart-rate under control as my pulse thuds deafeningly in my ears.
I'm hyperventilating.
I'm about to drown.
The Divemaster sees the torrent of bubbles streaming out of my reg's and comes over, thumb and index finger circled to ask if I'm OK.
I don't have to answer with the knife-across-throat gesture; the torrent of bubbles falling upwards and the look in my eyes is enough to tell him I'm having trouble breathing, beginning to panic.
He grabs me by the buoyancy vest, a hand hovering over my regs to make sure I don't try to spit them out, makes eye contact and reinforces it with two fingers back and forth between his and mine to say "look at me", reaches for my inflator and pumps air in to bring us safely back to the surface.
I go limp and let him guide us, close my eyes, try to still my mind, and focus on pulling and pushing air slower and slower.
He's the Divemaster, in charge of the dive, but I'm also a Divemaster - I might have a hundred dives to his thousand, but this is shameful.
I shouldn't be doing this, but it's happening now for the second time this trip.
It's 2018, and it's 5 years ago, and it's 5 months ago, and it's 5 yesterdays ago, and it's right now, and it was one of the last times I've gone in the water.
I look up from my laptop and look out over Turner, 30m above Northbourne Ave, and pull cold, moist air into my lungs.
It's not enough, but I hold it, stare into the darkness where I know the horizon to be, breathe out, then in.
I remind myself there's not 30m of suffocating water above my head, or 4 atmospheres of pressure constricting my chest.
I remind myself my buoyancy vest isn't too tight and I can breathe normally.
I remind myself I'm not about to drown.
The cars move north and south along the road beneath me, brightly coloured and auto-luminescent, moving in schools, scattered occasionally by the passing of a red-liveried barracuda; an apex-predator running along steel rails aping a living torpedo which glints like a steel rail in the depths. The sounds come into my ears as if through water, muffled by Active Noise Cancellation.
The music stopped a while ago and I hadn't noticed.
With a two-fingered hand gesture I switch screens, and press play on another song.
There are red-and-blue lights flashing silently on the road up Black Mountain under the watchful eye of Minas Telstra, which sits austerely white against the darkened sky atop a darker peak over the lights of the CSIRO laboratories which, in turn, float over the inky black of ANU in energy-saving mode. Someone's evening has reached a premature and unpleasant turn whilst my own continues anticlimactically thanks to an iterative descendent of Mr Dolby's miraculous invention for silencing unwanted noise. I find myself wondering why, if sleep makes waves, the opposite can't reliably be true.
If the best bed one can sleep on is peace I must have bought my mattress from the wrong store because pocket coils and memory foam have left me wound up like an over-torqued spring in a two-bob watch, trapped in pockets of memory when, at 3 in the morning, I emerge foaming at the mouth from the suffocating wine-dark sea of slumber.
I took today off work, not because I had anything fun planned, but because I've been feeling more burned out than the ashen dust brushed into Cinderella's pan-of-Peter, used-up and later dispersed to fertilise the beds from which will later bloom flowers destined to decorate the passage-way down which she'll run into the night, pursued by anxiety, a prince, and a hard deadline, shedding impractical footwear in her panicked rush towards her carbon-neutral, if magically-costly, carriage. The plans I had for my expensively-purchased day were similarly, baroquely grand:
Go out for brunch; and
Get my hair cut.
Sitting in the chair with a stomach full of Egg & Bacon Roll, I realised I'd slumped forward when the heavily-tattooed barber with gentle hands says, "You look tired, bro."
"Yeah, it's been a long..." selecting an order of magnitude more-or-less at random, "couple of months."
He grunts sympathetically, and rubs something soothing into the freshly-shaved sides of my head.
If youth is wasted on the young, then logically life is wasted on the living; I, who is certainly not the former, and arguably not the latter, am struggling to not become a waste of oxygen. Whether I'm succeeding would best be determined by consulting with the trees; I can only hope that by the time they cast their unhasty judgement my ashes have fed the soil in which they breathe sufficiently that they will stroke their beards, and judge me favourably.
Perhaps, some day, when I sink into the depths of endless, silent sleep, as unavoidable it will be then as it's been elusive now, and I provide my final service to this world by creating a space where more beautiful things can grow, I'll finally find peace.
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