Scuba, in which very little is learned

It's dark out, but no moreso than usual beneath the meters of ocean between me and fresh air oh god why am I down here???

I hate scuba. I hate it so much. I swore it was the absolute last thing I would ever ever ever try. I made all of those vows about how someone would have to be paying me a million dollars to get me into a wetsuit. I said only the promise of mouth-to-mouth from Tom Hiddleston could possibly persuade me to strap airtanks to my back and a breathing apparatus to my face because above all my other phobias (including my fear of heights, my horror of the dark, and my aversion to slime) I am most terrified of being unable to breathe. I'll never be an astronaut, because space? No air. Underwater? Also no air. Which is why the question really must be begged . . . what on God's green earth am I doing? And why am I not there, on the green earth of the Lord, instead of here?

Okay, so I know why I am here. It is a reason that seems horrifically inadequate at this moment, but I do have one. I have this really bad habit of deciding to confront things that terrify me, but I never do it in a considered fashion. I make snap judgments with the idea that it'll be fun! and what was I so scared of, anyway? and that usually lasts long enough for me to reach the point of no return, and then I'm in the thick of something I realize I never even wanted to do in the first place, so remind me, someone, please, to never allow myself outside the house without an accountability partner. I should get one of those, and another to remind me not to leave them behind, and also one to remind me to have one, and then another until they can all just sit on me when I have an impulse.

When I was a child, I read Readers' Digest articles. They were interesting, usually. Sensational stuff about serial murderer survivors and mountain climbing escapades; really top-notch journalism for my eight-year-old brain. Of course, the article that left the biggest impression was the one about the scuba diver who went into a cave system and got lost and used her last few minutes of air to carve a loving message to her family on her tank and then died alone in the dark in the water and the tank floated bumped around the ocean until someone picked it up and the only trace of diver ever found was that battered airtank oh no no no that is not the thing to be thinking about right now and hyperventilating into the mouthpiece is doing me no favors either.

A song is running through my head, and let it never be said that my own mind is not without a cruel sense of irony. Tell me how I'm s'posed to breath with no air; can't live, can't breathe with no air . . . no aaaaaiiiiiiiiiirrrrr . . . Thank you for the reminder, Jordin Sparks. I was aware that breathing without air is difficult, but that I can't live is something I'm trying to forget. She isn't done, though. Got me out here in the water so deeeeep . . . 

Water resistance makes it very difficult to give oneself a satisfying facepalm, or to effectively knock aggravating lyrics from the forefront of one's brain, but my efforts in that direction distract me enough from my panic to calm me down just a little. The space of water I'm in isn't actually all that dark or clouded, and at least I can see the bottom. Something else I'm horribly afraid of is open spaces. I mean, anything could be down there, if you can't see it, you know? Anything at all with teeth or baleen or whatever it is whales use to eat unsuspecting trespassers. Of course, my instructor would probably tell me that occurrences of whales eating scuba divers is more rare than alien invasion, or something equally ridiculous and even less reassuring. I rather wish he was around to tell me anything at all, though, because he's not. He's left me here, probably mistakenly assuming I would follow him like a good, normal student without a backlog of intense phobias to combat.

I think I've done rather well for myself, getting this far. I'm kind of stuck between two levels of confidence, though, and that's what has landed me in this predicament. I was ready enough to follow my leader away from the rope, but . . . he was going toward caves and deeper water. I couldn't do that. I saw the cavernous opening in the distance, and I knew it was full of things with tentacles (another phobia) and it was dark and sure to be slimy and definitely too small for me to avoid touching everything, so I froze, and then when I saw that he was gone, I unfroze enough to panic. It doesn't help that I froze up too far from the rope for me to find it again alone, but far enough back that he vanished rather quickly behind a rocky pile on the sandy bed. So now I'm stuck here. I don't know when he'll be back.

I can just sit here, I guess. He should be back soon. I think. I mean, he should realize that I'm gone, and he's supposed to be looking after me. . . . What if something goes wrong? What if my panic attack used up more oxygen than I have to spare? What if he gets stuck in the cave, and no one will ever know because I got stuck here waiting, and then I'll die because I waited too long for him to come back and I can't find the rope either? No air, no aaaaaiiiiiirrrr . . . I can just sit here, right? He's coming back . . .

I still can't hit myself very well, so it takes me about three cycles of this thought progression to realize that I need to either do something or go scuba-crazy.

Do I go back? I could, I guess. I'd really, really rather not get any closer to sea-caves than I need to. Just trying scuba out this far seems like enough to put that check on my bucket list. The ocean is a lot of space to find a rope in, though . . . and if I get lost, I'm not where my instructor left me, and he might not even find me.

On the other hand, going forward takes me closer to where I last saw my instructor . . . and a lot closer to the cave. It's darker down there. There is more seaweed . . . a lot more. Anything could be hiding in it. Anything with tentacles or teeth. I shudder and start to kick back, towards the rope, but . . . I could just wait for him at the farther end of the gully I'm in. He wouldn't miss me, that way . . . and I'd not be lost. Besides . . . I'm here, aren't I?

Even though I say I hate this, no one is making me try this new thing. No one is forcing me to confront this nightmare-inducing intersection of all my deepest fears. I left the house without my crowd of imaginary accountability partners, so this is all on me, and I paid money. If I don't go forward, the entire point of this exercise in lack of impulse-control and carpe-ing the diem will have been for nothing.

I take a careful breath, then two, and then I head for the end of the gulch. The end with the cave.

Oh. He's already coming back.

I follow him back the way we came . . . he finds the rope with no difficulty. We begin our ascent.

That wasn't so bad, after all. I mean, sure, there was a rough minute there, but this has been a new experience. I love those. Scuba is great. I don't know what I was so scared of. In fact, I want to go again. Maybe find a cave or five to explore. I am on top of this. I am the scuba queeeeeee jellyfish get it away get it away get it away I don't want to diiiiiiiiiiiiiieeee---