I’m 20 years old when I go diving for the first time. We’ve been in Egypt for almost a week, and I’m eager to get out of the hotel and into the Red Sea. As a child, I could swim and snorkel for hours, dipping my face below the waves to peer at the surreal and softly warping landscape below. My excitement wanes as we pull up to the shore. I’ve resisted seasickness for two decades, but my insides start rolling as soon I step onto the boat, and I stick my head between my legs as the engine starts.

The idea of this feels suddenly terrifying: a body tugged into a too-tight wetsuit and hitched to a heavy tank before being dropped into the sea like a stone.

“Tell my parents I loved them” I say half-jokingly to my friend as we’re handed flippers to try on.

Real panic hits when I’m treading water, and I only manage one or two desperate breaths into the regulator before I’m clawing the mask from my face.

“I can’t,” I tell the instructor, ready to swim back to the ladder and haul myself back onto the boat. He’s patient, smiles, says it’s normal, promises not to let go of my hand, reassures me that we’ll only be under a short time, that he’ll bring me up the minute I ask. And then I’m nodding and taking a last breath, letting him secure my mask again.

This is breathing, I tell myself, as I sink. I’m underwater, but I’m breathing.

The illogic of this sends panic dancing out to my fingertips, but I keep kicking my legs and swimming ahead, holding the instructor’s hand tightly in mine. I turn my head obediently as he points to shining parrotfish and solemn stingrays. Each second warps and elongates, and I can hear nothing but my own heart and my too-quick breathing. I hold panic in my throat. It flutters like a winged thing, but I don’t let it out.

***

Two and a half years later I’m deep in a depression that feels similarly airless and alien. My doctor and I are monitoring my mood. We’re on top of it, he says. Things are getting back to normal. But my days have become like odd funhouse reflections of normal human life. I make tea and take my medication and walk to the shops and post photographs on Instagram and all the while I feel like I’m watching it through thick aquarium glass. “This is not happening to me,” I write in a journal, “I’m not where I am. I’m not anywhere.”

It’s the start of winter and I take a lot of baths. Instead of going to university lectures or out to nightclubs or parties with friends I lie in the tub, tap dripping at my feet, cheek pressed against cool white resin. Growing up I’d hated baths, thinking them stifling, the too-hot steam making the crown of my head throb. I’d preferred the shower, the way the water was always moving, catching the soap suds and then slipping away down the drain. But standing up for long is too much, so instead I soak for hours in cooling water, feeling limp and sodden, like a shipwrecked creature washed ashore.

I blame winter for a lot of what hurts, imagining that a new season will change everything. I think of spring like a steaming pie on a windowsill, almost ready to be eaten. In a few months I’m sure I’ll feel better. The weather will get warmer and my life will peel open like an orange or a flower bud or a wrapped candy and there I’ll be inside of it, beautiful and bright and beloved.

I’m seeing someone, but even that’s not quite right. He’s thousands of miles away and, as he takes pains to remind me, not my boyfriend. I send him a package for Christmas so tenderly wrapped in brown paper that I wince when the woman at the post office throws it without looking into a large box behind her. Inside is a novel, a journal, a stack of letters, and a neatly folded T-shirt that I’ve carefully sprayed with my perfume. I wait for weeks for him to say something. “Oh, yeah, thanks!” he says when I eventually ask if anything’s arrived.

All the time I wait for him to break up with me, sure I’ll die if he does and even surer I’ll die if he doesn’t. We’re not in love, but I’m attached to him the way a moth-cocoon might attach to a tree or a speeding car might attach to a telephone pole. Playing at this serves a purpose. Without it I’ll have to change, and be brave, and make a life that grows upwards on its own. I can barely make it to the bathtub—nine heavy steps from my bed, and nine heavy steps back. And so I wait by the phone, willing his interest in me to reignite so that I can at last feel myself loved, lifted up, returned to the air.

One night my best friend Emily texts to tell me she’s outside. This depression has turned my days upside down and she knows that I haven’t slept before dawn in weeks. The routine is this: when I’m certain my roommates are asleep I go downstairs. Sometimes I’ll pour myself a bowl of cereal, or heat up some soup, but most often I’ll just grab a bottle of wine from the fridge and a clean glass from the drying rack before taking soft, quick steps back up to my room. Then I lie in bed, drinking the wine and watching reruns of American television shows as my head gets pleasantly fuzzy. My work is to try and focus only on the characters on screen, and I’m good at it. I can make myself care very much whether or not Lorelai and Luke work things out. It matters to me if Mulder find the monster before it’s too late or if Meredith does the right thing. When the sky starts to turn and I hear birds I pull the curtains tightly closed and sleep until evening.

“The weather will get warmer and my life will peel open like an orange or a flower bud or a wrapped candy and there I’ll be inside of it, beautiful and bright and beloved.”

My phone chirps again. “Bring a coat”. I don one over my pajamas and pull on some sneakers. “We’re going to the beach,” Emily tells me as I fasten my seatbelt and fiddle with the thermostat so that the hot air is blowing directly at me. It’s a 22-mile drive to the coast and we sit in soft silence. I rest my head on the window and close my eyes. This, I know, is not a trip to cheer me up or to distract me or so I can put any of my pains in perspective. We’re going to the sea so that I might see myself. So that I might return something to it. Or perhaps just so that the salt air can wear me out enough that I’ll sleep on the drive home.

***

When we arrive it’s past midnight and bitingly cold. It’s a few weeks into a new year and there are festive lights still strung between street lamps and they shine red and green on the wet road where we park. Emily smokes a cigarette while I walk alone along the concrete jetty. A lighthouse winks in the distance and there’s white froth on the water and I want so badly to step off the edge and into the dark waves. Not to die, but so that I can change. I want to plunge into black water and re-emerge, christened and clean, without hurt or need.

He finishes things a few weeks later and I start to sleep more, unable to bathe or refill my water glass most days. I skip weeks of class in a row and miss doctor’s appointments. When the phone rings I pull the duvet over my head and wait for it to stop. I drink a lot, don’t eat for days, and my insides are like strange fish within me. When I wake up it’s with panic, and then wave on wave of heart-sickness. Again and again the thought comes, clean and final: “I’m not going to make it out.”

But the weather gets warmer and the days longer and then it’s spring, at last, and I find that I am no longer a dead thing in a living body. I am not yet bright or beloved, but I’m eating more and leaving the house. I sleep through the night, and in the morning I marvel at this, as though I am both rested mother and serene newborn. I see a different doctor and take my new medication every day at the same time. I graduate and move out. I get a job walking dogs. I start writing and that shadowy presence I’ve walked beside for three years falls far enough behind that I can hardly feel its dark drag most days.

Some years pass. I date, move again, get a job in a gift shop. I topple into love in one single shining afternoon on a faraway coast, and then out of it again, quietly and privately in my bedroom back home. I start seeing someone, but it isn’t serious. It isn’t even fun. It’s the same relationship I’ve been in all my life, the one where I open like a lotus for anyone who asks, erasing opinion and want until I’m as smooth and blank as a bone. One night I’m lying beside him, this man who could be any man. His back is to me and his breathing is slow and shallow. I can’t sleep and the air-freshener above his bed puffs loudly and irritatingly every 15 minutes. I pick up my phone and in the dim dawn light I send a text to the last person who asked me earnestly about my day.

“Shall we go for a coffee later?”

“Again and again the thought comes, clean and final: ‘I’m not going to make it out.’”

The reply comes a few hours later. Affirmative. When we meet at the station he picks me up in his arms and spins me twice around. This is the first time we’ve met but I feel a tug of recognition. It’s November and the sun is high and bright in London as we walk along Regent’s Canal, talking quickly and breathlessly like two conspirators who are meeting again after a long separation. On our fourth date he gives me a set of keys to his place without any fuss. “So you can let yourself in,” he says. “It’s just easier.” In January we’re eating ice cream in the park and he asks me to be his girlfriend. Not long after that he tells me he loves me and I chase his words with mine.

Seven months later I move in. We push open the huge windows of his top-floor bedroom and clean for hours, wiping all the surfaces with damp cloths and pushing furniture against walls to vacuum the fraying blue carpet. I collect detritus: loose wires, coins, ticket stubs, lighters, tools, postcards, important-looking documents, half-burned candles, matchbooks, keys, notebooks, pens—and contain them all neatly in boxes which I slide under the sofa and out of sight. I insist that the bed must go by the window, so that in the summers we’ll get the best of the breeze and the sunsets. I hang my clothes in the wardrobe, shuffling them into his like cards into a deck.

In the autumn he quits his job and moves onto a canal boat 130 miles from London. He’s managing a brewery while also gutting and rebuilding the inside of the 69-foot boat that he’ll live on for the duration of the project. We decide that I’ll stay put, hold down the fort in the city, make my own career here. He comes home every few weeks, smelling like sawdust and oil and sweat and I laugh and pretend to struggle away as he puts his arms around me and pushes his face against my neck. After he showers he sits between my legs on our bed and we share a can of light golden beer as I brush the knots from his long hair.

When I visit him we sleep huddled close together on the bare floor of the boat, waking blue-lipped and exhausted as pale sun cuts through the uncovered windows. We discuss buying a boat of our own and sailing the coast of Italy. I feel thrills of excitement as he tells me what kind of boat we’ll get, how much it’ll cost and how we’ll work remotely while we sail, catching fish and drinking wine and trailing our feet in warm blue water. My heart quickens as he talks, thudding contractions. Thud. I know that this will happen. Thud. I know that this will not. Thud. I know that this will happen. Thud. I know that this will not.

We’ve been dating for 18 months. If our relationship were a border collie it would be big and bounding, hardly ever peeing on the carpet. If it were a human baby it would be walking, unsteadily but with growing confidence and curiosity. Conversely I feel cut down at the knees, panicked by frequent fighting and the physical distance between us. We are in love and we are tired, both feeling the magnetic compass-tug of separate futures. And though fluent in the language of being good to one another, we also speak its sister language, the language of hurting one another and then pretending that our hands are clean.

We break up over the phone in April. At first I feel the loss not as grief but as bewilderment, like being unable to find a set of keys I was so sure I had been holding just a few moments before. Where did I put you? Why can’t I find you again? When did you stop being here? Then it’s a long howl that doesn’t seem to stop even after I’ve moved the last box of my things out of our room, shut the front door and dropped his keys through the letterbox. On the drive to my new place I long to go back, for the keys to rush up into my open hands, the door to open, to walk backwards up the stairs and find him there. I want to end things lovingly, to separate our lives like the gentle and deliberate untwining of a long dark braid.

***

The first person I sleep with after the break-up has spent years of his life in love with a woman with my name. I am a collector of good and ordinary omens and I know this to be one. It’s June and I am almost 25 and we kiss like teenagers in the corner of a dark bar. He’s leaving the country in the morning and we agree that this changes the rules. We can say things like “you’re so cool” and “I really like you” and “come home with me” and “yes.” Yes is holy, I’m finding out. It’s a way back into the world. I’ve been single again for months and I’m my own stabilizing force. When I wake each day there’s nobody to shape the hours around, nobody to be accountable to but myself. I must say yes to the morning, to getting out of bed, to meeting friends for dinner. If I turn off my alarm and sleep until noon I’m the only person who’ll know. There is no watcher, now, no person to bring up the cup of coffee and kiss my shoulder, and tell me it’s time to work. Any rising or shining I do must be for me alone.

In August I meet someone. I’ve been dating all summer, not ever feeling much beyond faint attractions. But I snag on this guy, liking something that I can’t put a name to. He’s measured and withholding in a way that feels reassuring. It lets me know that we won’t get carried away and fall in love, that he won’t kiss my hands in public or use the word beloved when he talks about me. He’s confident, and he seems kind and clear in his wants. We see each other once a week, and things between us feel self-contained, as neatly framed as a photograph. We date for a while, agree it’s too soon, then pick things up again the next spring. I’m excited for our second first date, changing three times until I’m hot and flustered, sitting in my underwear on the bed, discarded clothes all around me.

“I’m not yet done with words like ‘beneath’ or ‘sunk’ or ‘wreck,’ but I know myself able to break the surface, to gasp and splutter and then breathe in big and be alive.”

I finish a pint and a half of beer before he arrives, and though I’m tipsy before we eat dinner I still drink the sake he pours. I’m both elated and unsettled, genuinely enjoying his company while also feeling sure that something isn’t right. One ordinary omen: we miss the train back to my place and have to wait 25 minutes for the next. Another: on our second date he orders me a beer that is so sour I almost spit it back into the glass.

After he fails to text me I call a friend to talk it through and she laughs at my concerns. “Things are fine or they’re not fine.” she tells me. “Men will act right or they won’t. Don’t make it your business.”

So I try not to. Not my business, I think, as he cancels plans at the last minute or avoids making them altogether, slipping artfully through my fingers until he doesn’t feel like a real person anymore. Not my business, as he tells me that he can’t promise to be in touch while he’s away on a long trip. And none of it is heartbreaking or world-ending, but it’s irritating; a fishbone-in-the-throat feeling that I don’t deserve. So I take the pause out of my voice, put aside the sweet, unearned patience, and I tell him he’s blowing it. Because reader: if it hurts you then it is, in fact, your business.

When we end things for good I wait for it to sting, for it to settle on me like a weight, but I surprise myself by feeling buoyed and unburdened. There’s no sense of injustice or unspent emotion, just clean relief, as though I’ve been dropped into a cool and ceaseless stream. I’ve stopped stubbornly defying the current and I am finally ready to go in the direction of my wide and waiting life.

***

A few weeks later I book a spontaneous flight to Greece. I look out of the window as the plane descends. The water around the island of Skopelos is so blue it looks as though the saturation has been cranked all the way up on a postcard—the kind that would read “Wish You Were Here!” in plump and reassuring lettering. I don’t wish that, though. I long for nobody who’s not in sight. I want nothing besides what I have.

“Because sometimes nobody writes back. Sometimes the name you’ve repeated like a prayer does not light up your phone screen or arrive in your inbox like a homecoming dove.”

There are hundreds of stray cats on the island, and though there are bowls of food and water on every corner they still trot at tourists’ heels and cry to be fed, dodging the scooters and motorbikes that huff up and down the slim cobbled streets. They press their small, lean bodies against ankles and weave between legs, sharp faces upturned. I wonder if my desire will ever be as bold as theirs, as I open my hands to feed them the leftovers I carry home. I give them what I have. They ask for more.

For the first time in a long time I’m not in pain or in love. I’m land and sea, solid but also in motion, being made new again and again, wave on wave. I’m not yet done with words like “beneath” or “sunk” or “wreck,” but I know myself able to break the surface, to gasp and splutter and then breathe in big and be alive.

Because sometimes nobody writes back. Sometimes the name you’ve repeated like a prayer does not light up your phone screen or arrive in your inbox like a homecoming dove. Sometimes you don’t bump into them on the street years later with your eyes bright and your hair freshly cut, wearing your better life like a long and gorgeous coat. Sometimes there is only skin grown over skin, the wearing smooth of an edge, the gifts you must dig for.

So I say this to the woman in the dark, to the woman asleep in the bathtub, to the woman who has been bringing me to myself all of my life:

One day you will tell the truth.

One day you will drop it in the water.

One day you will leave it there.