<< Out of nowhere I’m torn from the wall – my concrete savior so far – and thrown underwater, onto my back, floating free. I look up and I can see through the water to the light at surface level, which is now at least 2 or 3 meters above me…up to the first storey on the building. A tyre is hanging silently, suspended in the brine between the surface and me.
Everything is silent now. Peaceful almost. No roaring or rushing, a momentary sensory relief. Strange how such a deadly scenario could also contain tranquility in it’s belly.
Suddenly my world is a stream of thoughts. Time slows down incredibly. Or speeds up, maybe. Consciousness surges super fast, a million ideas and memories compressed into a couple of seconds of existence, like files on a zip drive….
And this is (condensed) what I think, then, suspended between life and death:
This is it. This is how I will die. No plans fulfilled, no seeing friends again, no marriage, no house no kids, no comfortable middle age and growing old like the sun. Just a couple of lungfuls of tropical ocean in a far away land that I don’t even know yet. How bizarre. This is what it amounts to. Just this.
Amongst it all only the thought of never seeing friends and loved ones again really bothers me. The rest doesn’t mean shit. At least I told my family I loved them yesterday, On Christmas Day..and I proposed to my soul mate, so she knows, she knows I love her..
I’d like to say that I was a ‘never say die’ hero; that I never gave in to and fought all the way through this disaster. But the truth is that when faced with the possibility / probability of death, for a second or two I did give up. I resigned myself to drowning, thinking that hopefully it would be a relatively peaceful way to go. At the time there really seemed no other option.
With no possible way to escape that I could see, I started to pray. We had spent the previous 3 months in India, visiting (among other places) some of the holiest Buddhist sites. After years of traveling intermittently to Asia I had already become convinced that this form of spirituality was for me. So I first prayed to Buddha, and at the end of this mentally spoken sentence I tacked on god’s name too, just to be on the safe side…
The next thing I knew I’d been washed into a room and I popped up to the surface like a cork, breathing desperately again. I could have only been underwater for a few seconds, but it truly felt like the proverbial lifetime.
I gasp for air repeatedly, scanning the room at the same time. I quickly realize that I’m in the room next to our bedroom. The room is about 60% full of water and I’m floating at the surface, swimming at what would normally be head height. At the far end of the room I can see a door, which is slightly ajar with come light poking round the edge.
I never knew there was a back door here. I could never have found this exit by choice. >>
