The straps should have loosened by now, they seem to be regular fabric. The ends are floating and tickling my legs, but I can’t move enough to scratch or change it.
I’ve tried not to urinate, but I gave up. I shouldn’t drink either, but I’m thirsty, I’m not sure if I can even cry anymore. Yelling wore me out, I gave up on that yesterday.
If it really was yesterday.
It’s dark and everything echoes. That steady drip that has been keeping time, maybe that’s my seconds-marker. I’ve counted, and given up, and lost which tens of thousands I’m in, or I guess fallen asleep. My ears are ringing and sore, I wrench my neck to keep them above the water but I’m hurting, and I don’t have the strength. The drips sound like a drum underwater, and I can hear my feet move.
I worry about the air. It’s getting harder to breathe.
I’m drowsy and aching and lost, I’m not sure I can feel my body except when it itches or hurts. This doesn’t seem to be a big place, the echoes are tight and constrained. It might be a hot tub. I just don’t know where.
I always hated the smell of chlorine. Like public pools at gyms or at schools, it always felt so medical, the smell that covers up humanity and pretends there’s no sickness around, it becomes its own banner for denial. A hospital smell. Something to mask the revulsion we fear in the world, each other. Artificial purity. It burns in my eyes and soaks into my hair…
Which is coming out. My scalp is burning the longer it’s submerged and I can feel little tickles of it by my elbows, my knees, I know it’s just falling out and I want to scream again and I can’t. My throat is raw. My sobs creak. I feel swollen and tired.

I’m not drowning, not yet, but that drip has been slamming into the water and maybe it isn’t filling so much as it’s keeping the levels even but I feel the surface tickle my chin and I don’t think it was that high before, and the gag is damp and my mouth tastes like chemicals and bile and I can’t scream anymore I just can’t I don’t know how.
I shouldn’t breathe so hard because I don’t know if the air…
If they thought I was dead, they wouldn’t gag me. Someone knows I’m in here.
My head is pounding in its own rhythm, I guess it’s my blood and my heart and it used to be fast but now it’s slower than the dripping sound, sometimes it hurts so bad I clench up and it feels like my skin is bursting and scraping off against the straps, how can I feel so shriveled and bloated at the same time? I’m so thirsty but I keep choking on my own vomit and my stomach feels like there’s glass shards in there but I know I couldn’t be stabbed or else I wouldn’t still be awake in here after all this time. This is what rotting feels like, tight and distant and sick-sweet and salty with tears. My wrists burn, I wonder if they’re bleeding and it’s so dark everywhere, what if the water is bloody and red and I’m soaking it all in and recycling it back through myself, filtering in and out until everything equalizes, what if there’s nutrients in the water so I can’t die and they keep me here for a week like a body in a glass jar, waiting for me to move…
I wonder how much of this water is my tears, how much of this water is me.
Maybe I’ll slowly dissolve into a gelatin slurry and they’ll garnish me with parsley and dip in cups to taste how scared I am, like I’m dessert, like I’m art or else why would someone keep a person tied up in a tub like this?
It’s dripping every second and the water on my chin is just a tickle, like I’m floating and I can’t tell what’s the surface or what’s the fabric or what’s my loose hair or if anything can be a way out, if I could simply float up and evaporate entirely, sneak out the cracks and corners and join the clouds somewhere. I just don’t know what this means.

My feet are burning, and my knees are burning and my stomach is on fire, it feels like I’m being broiled and popping, oily bubbles of my skin like buttery bread, the shifting doesn’t help and I must have been asleep but now there’s another smell. It’s not the same at all.
The denial of death.
Those chemicals like science class with scalpels on limp piles of what was once a frog or a pig but is now a mutilated mess of labeled bones and soft organs, I know this smell and I know that feeling. It’s a preservative. The sharp smell of something yellow that lasts. My torso is stinging and the first bits reach my chin and I’ve still forgotten how to cry, but I’m trying, I’m trying to feel anything that isn’t a classroom experiment and I’d welcome being spread out on a table with a knife in me just to know that I once identified as a human being instead of a pickled mass of limbs and why is this happening now? Why can I smell the onset of death when it could have been over so much easier, so much earlier, what if there’s other things in here with me, what if that wasn’t my hair I was feeling and my tears I was floating in all this time? What if I’m just the newest one…?

My eyes are stinging, they might be open or closed I can’t tell anymore, but the drip is faster or maybe I’m slower, and the water is reaching to my lips or I’m sinking and not fighting anymore, maybe I’m not special but I’m just the next one, the fresh one, the experiment of how long until someone stops fighting.
And I’ve stopped crying, I’ve stopped screaming, and maybe after this rest I’ll stop trying.
I can burn underwater, I know that now, and I think I might stop fighting.
The taste of humanity and denial in my mouth and maybe I’ll just stop fighting.

I used to dream of floating in the clouds.