This far below the surface, 120 feet of seawater filters the color spectrum so only the blues and blacks remain. When I shine my pocket dive-light on the reef it becomes a paintbrush, reds and pinks and oranges popping into visibility in the small circle of unfiltered light, the black lionfish flaunting its toxic frills, suddenly revealed in full tiger-technicolor.

*

Sounds carry in water, but there are few of them—I distinctly hear the snap of my air-tank O-ring giving way, the thunder like a reverse waterfall of my air free-flowing from the blown valve, a silver column rushing toward the distant surface. My thought is deceptively calm as the air-bubble-dragon flicks its tail at me in farewell: there’s no hyperbaric chamber on this island, a rapid ascent will be as lethal as the next reflexive inhalation which is a moment away. Slow-motion like my thoughts, I grasp the knife sheathed at my calf and strike my empty tank with its hilt—one more metallic sound carried through the water.

*

I know the desperation of a drowning woman.

*

*

Through the downward spiral of my drinking, the serious serial disasters—each of which seemed earth-ending to the sane people around me—I finally reached my bottom, the moment when the thing I would next lose meant more to me than booze.Yet I couldn’t stop drinking. I’d blown out the O-ring on my own spiritual supply—my distress call this time by cell phone rather than knife-hilt, to the sponsor who hadn’t heard from me in a year, and who responded immediately by extending Hope.  I wiped dust from my blue paperback Big Book—colored in earlier days with my own scribbled notes, Post-its from my husband, drawings by my kids, cartoons taped on the covers—and re-introduced myself to it.  “Hi again, I’m Kana.  I’m an alcoholic.”  I crept back to my home group, where women folded me into their arms and taught me again how to pray.  This is what we do.

*

*

One hundred twenty feet below the surface, God answered my distress call in the person of another woman, her arm extended with the air-supply she’d removed from her own mouth to share with me.  More than a mile offshore, we buddy-breathed to the surface, alternating breaths from a single source for the interminable duration of a safe ascent.  Colors reappeared as we rose, breaking at last into the full glory of a tropical afternoon.

*

In these 24 hours, because God sent me another alcoholic, I can breathe in the full spectrum of the supernal world.   In these 24 hours, I can gratefully extend a spirit-supply to an alcoholic drowning in my same sea—God’s gift of purpose to all of us.  Blessed breath be with you today.

 

~Originally published in Slippery When Wet, April 2011.