She did not drown in open water
she drowned in the corridors of her own mind,
where the walls pressed close and the air turned thick as grief.

Her throat tightened around words
she could never quite release,
while beneath the surface of her skin something hollow wandered
a ghost of what she used to feel,
lingering like smoke after a fire that forgot how to burn.

Loss had no sharp edges anymore.
It had become a texture,
a low hum beneath the bone,
the kind of ache you stop naming
because naming it makes it real.

But she was a creature of adaptation
forged not in warmth but in the art of surviving cold.
She read the wreckage the way sailors read the tide,
learned the rhythm of breaking so she could step between the waves.

She didn’t know how to be saved.
She only knew how to stay afloat
how to gather the splintered wood,
how to breathe through the salt,
how to wear survival like a second skin stitched over the first.

And so she drifted, not lost, not found
somewhere in the space between feeling everything
and feeling nothing at all, keeping herself whole
with the only thing she’d ever truly mastered:

the quiet, relentless act of enduring.

Corina.