I woke up on the ground.

I woke up on the ground, my knees tucked into my chest, my arms folded carelessly over my torso. The first thing I noticed was the cold. My skin was barely covered, with just a thin long sleeve shirt protecting my body from the frozen, icy air. My shirt and jeans were wet from the rain, frozen onto my body from the cold. I pressed my palms over my head in order to push my aching body up, and immediately regretted it. It was like dunking your hands into ice water. Or some version of liquid dry ice. My eyes flipped open and I immediately jerked my hands away from the ice water and leaped from the ground.

I was still somewhat dizzy, tilting and attempting to find my nonexistent balance. I stuck out my feet to attempt to stand still when I realized. I hadn't gone back down after I had leaped. Gravity wasn't doing it's normal thing. I was falling much, much slower than I was supposed to. I stuck out my arms to steady myself. I was floating. Like swimming, or how you would imagine it to be in space. I bent my knee and kicked to see if I would move. Sure enough, I tilted to one side and was propelled a few inches. Was it like hovering? Not quite. I was sinking. I was sure of that. Slowly, very, very slowly, I was sinking back to the ground where I woke up. However, if I continued to lightly kick back every few seconds or so, I could remain in place. I stopped kicking for a second and waited to land. I wanted to think. I needed to time understand, to process this. The tips of my toes touched the ground, and I was dragged into the floor.

My heart stopped. What I thought was the floor was actually a racing, thrashing sea of ice water. While I was able to lay on it in the beginning, I clearly wasn't able to now as I was caught and swirled into the icy depths again and again. My entire body pulsed with shock and horror. I was caught in an icy sea storm. Have you ever stuck your hand in a pile of ice or snow? Now imagine that you were dragged into a tsunami of ice, cut by the sharp edges slicing you over and over again. Forever churning, forever pulling you in. Blood on the ice. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. I couldn't see. My eyes were closed, with no intention to open them in this frozen ocean. I'd go blind. The water pulled me under, pulled at my chest, my hair, my body to give up. To let go. Waves crashed against each other and fought to kill me. I was first pulled this way. Then that. Then I was pulled in two different ways so hard I thought that I'd be torn apart. My skin was numb, I couldn't even feel the cold anymore. My brain was shutting down from the pain, from the ice. I started to slip unconscious and my eyes fluttered open.

Time stopped. I could feel no pain. I couldn't hear the crashing of the waves. I couldn't think. But I saw. The first I had actually seen since I woke up. The entire ocean was light. Was I swimming in fireflies? I don't know how I couldn't see it above the water, but under the water, everything was lit up and clear. Waves crashed down on me in slow motion and as I was swirled around, I saw it. The whale. From the house. From that night. I saw it. The whale was beneath me, swirled over by the force of the water as well. It's body contorted, trying to regain control of it's movements. It was forced over again by a current. It opened it's mouth, and it started to sing.

I heard it, and my body spasmed. My heart grew cold. My vision went blurry, and I saw images flash before my eyes. A girl with a bow and arrow, shooting at a giant that roared in horrible, sad pain which turned into a light, at first a shooting star, falling from the heavens that was actually a young boy, no older than 4, falling onto a sand dune that exploded which turned into a God, a great and terrible God that spoke great and terrible words to a terrified couple who were holding a baby, and the couple were sucked up into the sky where they became stars and the baby was thrown into the God's hands, and the God spoke great and terrible words to the baby, and the words became actions and the actions became ideas that sprouted in the mind of a mist, a mist that was stuck somewhere, somewhere horrible, but not anymore, and was waiting, waiting for someone to come and to become the body for this parasite that would do great and terrible things that would become history eventually because the world was ending and the universe and everything known and unknown was about to have never happened, because something wanted the pain and suffering to stop. And my head exploded into a thousand stars.

Something, somewhere decided that I needed to live. Something, somewhere decided that it was not my time yet. That I still had purpose in the world. So that something, somewhere, decided to let me stay in this time for a little longer. And I woke. My head hurt like hell, my lungs burned for air, and my frantic body exploded out of the sea, into the dead air.