A long time ago now, I drowned. I must have been 11 or 12, it was on a holiday in Scandinavia. I want to say it was in Norway, but I don't know. I was with a friend's family, they always took me with them on family events. Parties, trips, walks - all the stuff that never happened at my home, but that's another story.
We were at this skiing place, right next to a forest. There were paths and roads in it during the summer, but here in the winter, the snow veiled it all. There had been a huge blizzard last week, and it kept snowing each day after, so there weren't even any footsteps. Except, of course, for ours. I was with Oscar and Ashley, the two siblings. There was this hybrid between a pond and a lake deep in the place.
It was transformed since we last saw it by a languorous layer of ice. We discovered that if we skipped things over it - branches, stones - that the most eerie and hauntingly beautiful sound was released. It was like the sound had been trapped in the water, in the ice, when it had frozen over, creating that stillness that belongs to lakes, and when we rapped on its surface we were letting it out. Oscar and Ashley were going to get more sticks to throw at it. I tried walking on the ice. It felt completely solid beneath my feet. I made it right up to the centre.
As soon as I was under I was lost. The lake just swallowed me, I didn't even hear the ice crack. I don't even know if I mde a sound. In the time it took to flinch the freezing water had flooded through my clothing. In the time it took to gasp, or scream, it had forced its way down my throat. Everything burnt inside of me. I tried coughing it out and it felt like I was bleeding through my lungs. I thrashed, everything a foggy blur, like the ice had trapped in a huge mist as well as that sound, as well as me.
Somehow I found the surface, but all I could see was ice. It was almost transparent. I could see the cracked blue sky through the frozen water. But it had been cloudy. And it wasn't even sky blue, what I saw above me in that place. It was deeper than the darkest shade of indigo. Almost black. Like dusk after the orange lingering of light has fled, when you turn and look at the furthest point of the eastern sky. It was darker than the water surrounding me. What they tell you about drowning is a lie. Eventually I stopped struggling. But it still hurt, it hurt so much. My limbs wouldn't move, I felt slowness creep up them until they started to sink. I'm sure I was crying but my tears were swallowed up by that ocean too. It was so black that I couldn't tell if I was looking through the ice or down into the abyss of that pool.
When I woke up, my entire body was colder than the snow beneath me. I could barely lift my chest to breathe. No one knew what happened. I was outside again. Out of the pond, lying face up a few meters from the edge. Hours had passed, Oscar and Ashley had ran back to the cabin to tell their parents. The police were the ones who found me. We all assumed some stranger passing through the forest had seen me go under and dragged me out. I don't remember that part. No one was there. All I remember is that coldness, how cold I felt when I woke up. I shivered long into the following night, day, week, long after I stopped feeling the chill. But now I'm cold again. The heater in my room has broken but I don't have time to go to the landlord or whoever and get it fixed. The cold doesn't matter any more, if I leave I'll drown, so I keep reading. I'll go read now.
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