The storms we weather

It was as if I had been cast adrift in the heart of a raging storm,
somewhere in the vast Atlantic, where the horizon had vanished.
In the beginning, I fought –
Fought the waves that towered and broke over me,
their weight like a force I had never known.
But no matter how I thrashed, they swallowed me whole.

And so, at some point, I let go.
I surrendered to the chaos, to the deafening roar of water and wind,
and I sank.
I don’t know how long I drifted beneath the surface –
Days? Weeks? Months?
Time became as formless as the sea.

Eventually, the thrashing stopped.
I found myself suspended in an eerie stillness,
the chaos receding into silence.
And it was there – in that quiet –
that the weight of meaninglessness pressed against me,
cold and endless.

I floated in it,
aching, untethered, and directionless,
no longer certain if life or death held any real distinction.
I saw how fragile it all was,
how everything depended on what we dared to make of it.