Within me there’s an ocean vast and deep, endless and cold and dark as the sky on an overcast night. I fear often that if I misstep, I might slip and plunge into its depths, that it might consume me, rendering me nothing but a soul drowned in my own well.

Curious that my body can contain its infinity, the ponderous swell of it, small as I am. But that’s just it- it’s always there, exerting pressure, pushing at the seams, bruising me from the inside out, and threatening to leak out slowly from my eyes only to fill my room, a deluge, a flood, another way to drown, to choke, to succumb.

It’s been this way since I could first remember being; the knowledge of it, the foresight of bad times, the cuffs of my pants soaking wet and frigid. Even when the ocean’s surface is placid, I’ve feared disturbing it, wished I was a better swimmer or that the waters could at least be warm.

Is it like this way for everyone? Or have others learned how to become seafaring folk- to build boats, to fish, to coexist with the vastness of their own personal oceans? I know others have the same thing inside of them, at least some people, because I’ve seen many a soul sink below their own black waves, some of them never to rise to the surface again.