Wakeless Nightmare

Day 1072.

I met a man last night. His daughter almost drowned.

One minute they were frolicking in the waves together, father and daughter, and the next; a wave took her, sucked her under, ejecting her thirty feet away, then sucked her under again and further out to sea. A void of white water divided that father from his child as she was sucked under repeatedly, surfacing gasping for air, her hair across her face, before being sucked back under, over and over. He felt powerless.

His story ends well.

He wasn’t powerless.

He grabbed a surfboard from someone next to him and paddled against the battling waves as the full might of the surf pushed him back to keep him from his girl. But he defied that surf and saved her.

Still, a decade later he repeats the scenario in reoccurring dreams that end the other way. In those dreams he touches the threads with which I live; the agony of her death, then awakes to the euphoria that it is not true.

I was moved by his story.

His description of the surf sucking his child swiftly and violently to sea, away from his grasp, a void betwixt them, a mass of unsurpassable turmoil, a stretch of treacherous unknowns.

He could see her. He could see her struggling. But he could not grab her. She could see him. She struggled on. But she could not grab him. He fought to reach her. He didn’t give up. She fought to keep breathing, fighting over and over to the surface. She didn’t give up.

This is the life of living with a child in addiction, in depression, in eating disorders.

We see them struggling. We can not reach them. We are helpless. We fight against impossible forces to try and reach them. I fucking did. I never stopped.

Sometimes our fingertips would touch. Maybe a light clasp of hands, a moment of relief and then he’d be sucked back out.

Over and over.

Exhausted, for years I’d struggle to bring him to safety, our eyes locked across the void and when he looked away I’d cry out his name – Luke! Look at me! Look at Mummy! Come to me! I play the scenario over and over like a recurring nightmare.

Like many, Jerome gets to awaken from his reoccurring nightmare, euphoric. Many, like me, do not.