I sink, sit and let real life muffle, wrapping around me. My breathing is cut, my face muscles are set free. My body drops the personality number I-don’t-even-know and moves like no one is watching. Loving him feels like being underwater. I look at him. My muscles do not flinch anymore. From the first day we were together, I saw no danger in holding my breath and letting the water hold me tight.
I’ve always loved being underwater. Not really ‘’swimming’’ but diving in and staying there, perhaps swimming like whales do. It was the first thing that ever felt truly therapeutic to me, along with coloring.
I could never be the person to trust my instincts, for it is easier for me to just dismiss them, writing them off as paranoia and compulsions. That is probably the reason why I was hesitant to connect the dots between the safety I felt and my boyfriend. It never sank into me that my tendency to be numb was also applicable to my romantic life. In retrospect, one of the reasons why I wanted to be underwater was to drown out the relationship I was in at the time.
I thought romantic relationships always had to involve a sense of violation. To me, they meant submitting to the eventual violation a relationship brought. I can confidently say that my romantic relationships had sticky fingers before and I was accustomed to losing a shade of myself whenever my romantic involvements eventually ended. So, every involvement came with my sharing less, and less and less of myself with the world. Mind you, I had already shared very little.
A lot of people associate being underwater with being suffocated, surrounded by unknown vastness. A terrible fate. When my first boyfriend left me, I happened to stay at a spa hotel a couple weeks later with my family. There, slowly but surely, I learned to be content with the fact that water calmed me like nothing did. The ultimate numbness that came with feeling invaded and thrown out suddenly looked me in the face and shook its head. I don’t believe I could survive that year without writing down shitty poetry in the name of expressing myself.
Before him, I remember the faces I let into my life. I remember retreating into my shell more and more. I did not love one of them, not really. I think I had a problem with not staying busy in the background, and boyfriends & one heartless capricorn girl helped.
With him, safety grows in small, boring ways and feeds into love that lasts longer than any firework, any butterfly, and any electric current. When I am underwater, time stretches. Seconds feel wider and less hostile. As cliché as it sounds, my current relationship feels like the smell of coffee in the morning.
I am so used to chasing signs that the person I am in a relationship secretly hates me, wants to leave me sooner or later, doesn’t bother with my unpopular takes and quirks that I don’t know how to behave without these predetermined rules at the back of my mind. After three years, I’m still trying. Every time I look at him, I try.
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