Detonation

A trigger.

And without warning everything changes.

My mind shifts, rattling the very structures that bind me together, like tectonic plates sliding beneath the ocean, causing a detrimental effect to everything that surrounds it. A tsunami meets the back of my eyes, seeping through my eyelids, and flows off my cheeks, a brackish waterfall over the jagged edges of a cliff. The tears land among pebbles in the frigid river beneath me. My jaw clenches, teeth grinding on themselves as if to create a bleeding mountain from each molar. My tongue is tight, coiled like a rattlesnake, my words easily the venom should they escape, so I seal my lips. My shoulders hunch forward in an unintentional submission, the downward slope of a rolling hill, without the beauty of the vibrant shades of green and glisten of the sun. My arms become Autumn leaves that fall, bereft of all strength except of that to hold my anchored head. My legs become weak, the rotten trunk of a tree likely to snap at any moment, so they curl to my chest. I inhale, an altercation with my lungs, it seems, to accept air, a river attempting to flow upstream against itself. My stomach contracts, threatening to explode, a restless volcano laid dormant for a moment too long, and my chest, despite the erratic beating of a broken heart, is hollow and dark, a cave cold and damp.

I am a detonation, yet lifeless.

My feet, which once carried me to places of glory and peace, carry me to the shore of what may have been paradise once. Now the ocean is quiet and still, apparently too sad to be disturbed, its somber blue blanketing secrets. The sky, once a brilliant orange, red, purple sunset painting, turns to grey, daunting and wicked. And sand that once was soft and giving is dry and coarse, and with each weary step I sink further into the seashore. The sun is setting, a burning orb of hope and joy and laughter, falling behind the depression, the abysmal cobalt before me. The sky darkens, weighing its unsettled and anxious clouds on my quivering shoulders. And the sand, quicksand now. Seagulls spin around me like the thoughts in my head, screeching and screaming phrases of damnation.

And all I can do is pray I find a way off the island.