The Depths by Nicole Lesperance EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Nicole Lesperance
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Series: None
- Price: Free
- File Size: 6 MB
- Publish Date: September 13, 2022
THERE’S A VIDEO OF me dying on the internet, and I can’t stop watching it. My
mother says it’s morbid and I need to stop. I know she’s right, but every night
before I sleep, I pull the blankets over my head, turn my phone’s volume
whisper-low, and curl my body around the tiny screen. I only need to type the
first letter of my name; it fills in the rest.
Adeline Spencer freediving accident
A boat crowded full of people sits rocking beside a square of ocean,
cordoned off by white PVC pipe. It’s a perfect tropical day, the sun glinting
off the flat aquamarine. I’m just about to complete an underwater dive of
sixty-three meters, as deep as a nineteen-story building is high. No weights,
no fins, nothing but my own body to propel me.
Everyone is screaming.
Not cheering. Screaming.
Droplets of water fleck the camera lens. Three divers—my safety divers—
break the surface, cradling me among them. My eyes are open and flat; my
mouth is slack.
Breathe, Addie, breathe, they’re shouting.
But in the salt-spattered video of water and panic, I don’t breathe. The
camera pans closer, zooms in on the pink foam slipping down the side of my
jaw. The trickle becomes a burst, pink turns crimson, and everybody on the
boat falls silent. In her flowered sundress, my mother leaps into the water and
thrashes toward me. Her wide-brimmed hat floats away into the open sea.
One of the safety divers wipes away my bloody foam and presses his
mouth to mine, blows a sharp exhale through my teeth.
Breathe, yells everyone on the boat. Addie, come on. Breathe!
I hear them now, but I didn’t then. That’s the part I can’t wrap my head
around. That’s why I keep watching this. I see myself—I see my body, but I
don’t think I’m in there. I don’t understand what it means, where I went if the
inside part of me left my body. All because of a silly mistake I made, pushing
through pain instead of turning around like I should have.
The video ends as they’re pulling me onto the boat. For eight and a half
minutes, they say, I was dead. But I don’t remember bright lights or long
tunnels or warmth or unconditional love, like people say is supposed to
happen. There wasn’t any heaven or hell or anything in between. Five
hundred and ten seconds of my existence are just gone. I keep pressing the
replay button, cycling through the video over and over, but I never get any
closer to understanding. It haunts me, this question I’ll never be able to
answer.
Where did I go?
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