To the Hope I Couldn’t Hold
It’s like drowning—not in water, but in life. You’re sinking slowly, breathless beneath the weight of your world. The deeper you go, the more silent everything becomes. Your limbs float like forgotten thoughts, your chest tightens with each heartbeat. The fight within you begins to fade, replaced by a quiet, eerie acceptance.
And then—you see it.
A thick, gnarled root drifts above you, cutting through the distorted light. It’s strong. Steady. Alive. You can almost feel its warmth through the freezing depths. That root is them—the person you never knew you needed until your soul screamed for help.
And suddenly, hope flares—wild and desperate. Every cell in your body strains to reach, to rise. The stillness inside you shatters. You want to live again. You want to breathe again. But the ocean is cruel, and time is unkind.
Because you’ve sunk too deep.
Your legs are tangled in the weeds of your past—regret, fear, mistakes that clutch like vines. You stretch toward that root with trembling hands, but it remains just out of reach. Close enough to see. Close enough to feel. But never close enough to hold.
And that is the cruelest part of all.
Because before you saw the root, you had made peace with sinking. But now—you know what could have been. What almost was. And that kind of hope doesn’t save you. It shatters you.
So you let go—not because you want to, but because you must. You return to the depths, but this time, it’s different. This time, your chest aches not from the pressure of the ocean, but from the absence of what you almost touched.
They were the right person.
You were just too far gone.
