As I come back home to you...

I was sprinting. My legs straining, my pulse racing, sweat dripping down my face, yet I felt nothing. Yards turned into miles, miles turned into years, yet I was still running. I must have been physically exhausted beyond belief but I felt none of it. Physically, I felt fine. Emotionally, I was a wreck. I was stressed, panicked. I felt as if I could never stop running. As if my feet rhythmically hitting the road were the only thing keeping me alive, my only claim to existence, and stopping would mean quitting, giving everything up. Giving up everything I had worked for, all the miles and years I had left behind me would mean nothing. I wanted to stop, but I needed to keep going. I was torn. And then, there it was. A long wooden dock, marking the end of my trip, the end of my existence. Beyond it was millions and millions of miles of deep, dark, blue water surrounded dense, luscious woods. I'd never seen anything that beautiful and terrifying. I knew what I had to do. I had to jump into it, to immerse myself in the deep, blue nothingness and give up the race. But it's not so easy, giving it all up. So as I reach the end of the dock and the rhythmic thumping of my feet against the wooden boards turns into silence. As my heartbeat slows and my limbs throb, as my body adjusts, as I wait for the inevitable wave of nausea that soon follows a hard workout, I just stare at the water. At water so deep that even if it was the clearest water in the world and you had those goggles with the funny light on top, you still couldn't even begin to see the bottom. I want to cry. Because it's beautiful and because it's awful and because I know what it means. I take off all my clothes, clothes I've worn forever, through all the miles and years. The clothes I have endured everything imaginable in. And then I sit on the edge of the dock naked, not caring about inevitable splinters in places wood should never touch and not caring about what the other people, lining the shores, hidden by the trees, must think because here they don't matter, barely even exist. I dip my feet in tentatively and "test the waters". It's cold but surprisingly comforting and I stand up, not wanting to leave it's comfort, and bend over getting ready to dive. As if I'm only going to dive into the local swimming pool on a hot summer day or off the sun deck on my beloved boat as I've done so many times before, where I know what awaits, yet I know this is different. I have no idea what awaits, all I know is that I'm ready to find out and all my doubts and uncertainties are washed away by the excitement. So I do it. I go through the motions. My legs bend and I leap off the dock. Up and over, in a perfect rainbow. And it's all going so slow. I can feel myself glide through the air and my brain registers as I'm about to hit the water. My fingertips touching the water, at first very gently, making them tingle. Then it's a blur as my body slides into the water. Every single inch of my body sits up and takes notice as the darkness closes in around me and I become the water. And I know, in that instant, that this is exactly where I'm supposed to be.