Second Creative Writing Challenge Task 9: From the Depths

My final story for the Second Creative Writing Challenge Task 9 by @steemfluencer is a story of addiction and change.

From the Depths

Jonathan had hit rock-bottom. Literally. He had hit the bottom of the ocean floor in the bay. This is what his drug-induced mind had finally led him to do: to find his rest among the muck and the bottom-feeders.

Only vague shadows danced around him, the supports for the dock as long black columns of judgment in this aqueous hall of the condemned. He could see moored boats anchored to the seabed by the dark lines of thick ropes, hanging like gallows.

“It seems appropriate somehow,” he thought, recalling the decision to shuffle down the dock and silently slip into the dark waters. It was better for everyone.

He had led a life of drug dealing, starting off innocently enough in middle school where he sold some stinky glue his father had bought at the hardware store to some friends. Somehow, it had escalated from there into a full-time job — no into his lifestyle. Everything was about drugs, the next deal, the next high, all else was set aside before these.

Jonathan didn’t have family anymore, none that would admit it, anyways. Apart from their mutual addictions, he had nothing in common with his friends, and he was certain they wouldn’t even notice his passing.

As he lay beneath the watery canopy, holding his last breath, Jonathan thought about what might have been had he made some different choices. If he had only listened to his mother when she had found the bag of pills in his room in high school. Maybe he’d be happily married right now. Perhaps he’d even have kids and a home and a job.

Instead, his home had been a particular pile of trash in the alley on 5th Street and Sisson Avenue. Temporarily, at least, until the cops found him and sent him on his way.

His unfocused gaze suddenly came to life in sharp, crisp images. The clear outline of the boats from the world above, languidly rocking with the gentle waves, carrying on with their happy dance in the world of the living.

The sun must have come out from behind the clouds, as a sudden host of rays permeated Jonathan’s dark grave, highlighting a twisted rope that dangled from a nearby boat. It was like any other rope, Jonathan knew, and yet the sun made it glisten like gold, making formerly unseen particles in the water suddenly come alive around the rope.

At that moment, Jonathan remembered a kind man who had handed him some money as he lay in his bed of garbage yesterday. Jonathan had used the money to buy more drugs, of course, instead of food, but the money wasn’t going to fix anything either way.

The man’s words had since been forgotten in the subsequent drug-induced stupor, but now they came back with sudden clarity: words of hope, of an unsurpassed love from a God who cared so much about him that he sent his son Jesus to pay for his sins, for his wreckage of a life.

Of its own volition, his hand had reached out toward the nearby gilded rope. He felt alive, as if he were suddenly rejuvenated, suddenly clean. He wanted to live! Not the life he had before, not the man he should have been - that man had died beneath the surf. But he would be a new man, having been given a new life.

Jonathan began to pull.

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