Cherry Soda

Firstly you feel weightless, at first ethereal then terrifying. There is no light, there are no surroundings. You are a naked soul in a dark ocean both figuratively and literally.

Secondly, your senses are nonexistent. There is nothing to hear except for creaking that permeates from somewhere around you. Like a speech bubble of sorts it appears in your mind, blips into the darkness, then fades. Where it hails from changes. Sometimes in the direction where your arms used to be, others from your legs, your chest. You panicked at first but then steadied your breathing, stopped your yelling. “Someone noticed”. You tell yourself. “Someone noticed”. You grow to hope.

The creaking grows steady, it’s a part of your cocoon. Soon, as you inhale, drawing from a thinning pool of oxygen, you can feel your chest brushing against the metal. Your right arms begins to feel entombed after another creak. You welcome these feeling at first. They are feelings. Something, just anything. A reminder what side you sit on, that you are alive. They fade and that entombment is now part of your cocoon.

Nothing happens. A bubble, dancing off of the visor you forgot you had, appears. In your heart you welcome him like a long lost friend but alas it fades.

You’re back to the embrace of your cocoon. That constant ever tightening, like the inside of snakes gut, cocoon. That always there but never really there, cocoon.

And the creaking. You feel the cocoon shrink once again. The metal sounds tired, at it’s end, at it’s limit. It’s crying almost. Like it’s sad it disappointed you. It failed it’s job.

You feel stuck yet nonexistent.

It shrinks further.

You try to move, to flail, to try anything but your limbs don’t exist. You can’t feel them. You are but a pair of eyes and a disjointed symbiote sinking further and further.

The cocoon shrinks.

You almost cry. Due to reminders of limited oxygen you hold it in. You can imagine yourself, a fake reflection on your visor, face red and biting your lower lip to hold in a wail. A never to be heard cry for help.

A red light flashes. Soon, and promptly you are without oxygen.

It’s quiet at first nearly forgettable, then, the you, floating in that black expanse separates from itself. Numerous you's spinning on an axis, and around the initial image of yourself. You feel pain from various places. Sore almost. It appears, adding red blotches to the after images.

Time passes and the you's spin slowly on their own axis, away from you, out into the darkness but not too far to be seen. Long lazy curls, almost as if in slow motion. Like a symbolic display of sanity in exodus.

In a way they add to that sense of weightlessness. In an ironic fashion, remind you of your shackles, your chains. The cocoon. It’s a subtle feeling like you’re floating in a tank of water with a loose chain on your foot and jets beneath you. Silent ones, ones you’ve grown not to feel. It’s weightless and imprisoning.

Time passes and these worsen. More you's spiral from your initial self and at times you feel among them. Disoriented. A loss of position. It’s again, ethereal, and time has been so slow that it’s almost nostalgic.

Your breathing is rapid and shallow. In a way, it’s silently frantic. Like a subdued panic. Like a whimper for help.

Time passes.

Somewhere, in the void, your head begins to pound. It’s a searing pain. A jolting pain. A dawning pain. The slow arch of the you’s in a subtle fashion speed up and begin to blur.

Sweating sets in. You feel cold and in the lost of other feeling, with the mix of whatever else you’re experiencing, like you’re drowning. It’s hazy, and you can’t really focus on, or make any of it out but with the rapid breathing you begin to feel as if you’re taking in water. Like it’s some ill advised fail safe your brain devised. It’s hungry. A blurry, liquid blue seems to fill around you. With your vision, it’s more of a blue haze. A mist of sorts. You begin to gag. Your heart rate staggers from fears and some other unknown sources. You want to move to struggle but your limbs and body fail in feedback. They don’t exist. You are a pair of eyes witnessing a death. Some cold being forced to sympathies the death of dog by experiencing it.

You are cold, entombed by this ocean. It has an intimate sense with you. Like, again, like you’re stuck in the gut of snake being digested or some other, weird mythical beast with insides like a tundra. Cold, barren, absent of the one thing you thirst for; hope. You try to struggle again but a lack of response rains in like a reminder, a dark voice from the ever hazing void, of your helplessness. Nothing responds yet pain courses through you, the slowly spinning you’s a near blurred out mess. You can’t focus, you can’t concentrate, and the speed at which you switch between them makes you sick.

You vomit. It’s retched upheaval. You feel so weak. Your eyelids, last line between knowing death and life, are heavy. It’s almost symbolic. This giving up, this giving in, this done for, “I am out.” You struggle, to at the least, keep your eyes open. To take hold of your last once of freewill and fight.

Pain, blurry entombing pain rings from around you. Your muscles ache as if this gut it compressing. Like your bones are shattering, like you're being squeezed.

Then you feel it. It stands out, but not by much, a wet feeling by your toes. This is distinct. For the first time in a long time you hear a creak, a slow winding creak and the pain that ensues clears your vision for a moment. Disorientated you glance around the void, and can see, in the second your vision eases up, that their left leg is missing.

The clarity doesn’t last long and soon it’s back to whatever hell you suffered before. You’re begging for air. Your breathing picks up again and after another loud creak, you can barely move your chest. You glance around the void, but all is a blurred association of speed. You can tell there is movement but fail to have the means to discern them.

Another creak, but the clarity provided by the wave of pain is nowhere as clear as last time. It’s from worse to less so. Yet, you can tell, you think, you’ve lost an arm. Left or right you can’t tell. You can’t think, you can’t focus- you can’t even be rational enough to feel fear. In this moment the ethereal void blends with this lost of self equates to helpless weightlessness. This, drifting in space with a compromised suit sort of feeling. The compression blends with this other sense you can’t discern and it’s as if space it trying to suck you out as one, long, slushy tube. That’s what you feel at this moment.

Another creak. You can’t breathe. Something crushing your chest, and with your already rapid breathing, something close to fear, a prehistoric relative, probably locked into our genes, courses through your compromised, nearly non-functioning brain. You literally feel like an insect. Like you are too simple to process that which a human should. All is a bit of itself. The shell of its former. You cannot think or process and darkness holds you. In a sick twist the weight on your chest, the bar, is enough to make you remember, or feel in some streamlined, simplified sense, what mortality is but enough to continue suffering. Something out in that void hates you.

Another creak and more pain hailing from somewhere. This barely even eases the blur. You can’t even tell what you lost. Time, you lost the ability to perceive it. To feel it. To count it. To recall it.

Another creak, dull pain.

Everything is nearly black.

Another creak as the tin can closes into itself and you are, soon to be, cherry soda.

A blurry, all encompassing pain is the send off you get. The cocoon closes in on you slowly shattering every bone have until you resemble a red paste.

To say again, you are cherry soda in the tin can you called a suit.