The Water Doesn’t Lift You [Saturation Phase Ongoing]
💀 TCDJ™ Entry 002 - No one hears you drown if they’ve already applauded your survival.
No one hears you drown if they’ve already applauded your survival.
— Echoed from the Deep Silence Protocol
You’re at the bottom.
That’s not a metaphor — it’s geography. A fact.
You look up and there’s a perfect circle of light way above, too far to mean anything. You can’t climb. No one’s throwing you a rope. No secret door, no miracle. Just damp stone walls and water lapping around your ribs, rising slowly.
The air tastes of warm rust-blood tang. That flavour that hits after you bite your lip.
Sink.
The kind of rising you don’t notice until it’s too fucking late. You’re not being lifted. You’re being swallowed. Your ribs ache from the holding. Each breath cuts smaller now, thinner at the edges. You wonder how long lungs can negotiate with water before they give in.
At first, you think maybe the sky will reach you. Maybe the light will drip down if you hold still enough. Maybe someone will notice the absence of your noise and come looking.
But they don’t.
You go quiet and the world just keeps scrolling. Silence presses soft against your eardrums, thick as cloth. Beneath it, your heart sounds distant, someone else’s problem echoing through bone.
Somewhere behind the stone, a cable hums, high, insect-thin, proof the surface still dreams in circuitry. A single drip ticks beside your ear, a lazy metronome.
Settle.
Then come the stones. Not one or two. All kinds. All shapes. All speeds.
Some small and sharp. Others heavy and stupid.
Thrown by hands you recognise.
Each one lands somewhere beneath your skin, a bruise you’ll catalogue later. Friends. Family. Strangers with opinions and too much time.
Every voice that said, “You just need to try harder.”
Every smile that didn’t reach your eyes.
Every “just checking in” that made your stomach churn.
They’re not helping. They’re performing.
For likes. For image. For distance.
Because watching is safer than diving in.
A coin splashes down, glinting once before it sinks past your knees. The price of a wish no one meant.
The water shifts with every rock. But you don’t rise. That’s the part they never get. The well doesn’t fill in a way that lifts you. It displaces you.
You sink.
You learn to tread water in judgment, in expectation, in everyone else’s shit. The weight isn’t dramatic. It’s dull. Repetitive. Ritualistic. And always followed by more bullshit.
You’re in the well, but it’s worse than isolation. It’s purgatory.
That ugly place between who you were, who you might’ve been, and the ghost you’re becoming.
Time doesn’t move here. It stretches, like it’s mocking you. You think:
“Maybe if I just wait this out.”
“Maybe if I’m good.”
“Maybe if I prove something.”
But nothing happens.
You stay. You fester.
It’s not pain. It’s static. It’s inertia with teeth.
Your joints hold it like old glass. Brittle, humming with pressure that never quite breaks. And somewhere in the silence between the stones, you envy even the algae; at least it climbs.
Your skin itches beneath the waterline like something growing there, something alive that shouldn’t be.
And somewhere deeper, you start to feel it: the watcher.
Not human. Not helpful. Just present. Patient. Indifferent. Immense.
The watcher expands. It does not watch with eyes. It surveils through trendlines, stock tickers, latency graphs, the numerical scripture of a civilisation too busy curating itself to notice its own putrefaction. Humming like a data centre choir, air-conditioned psalms whispering through server aisles.
You feel it now, beneath your skin, a weight not heavy but constant. Threading itself through muscle, tightening with every breath you didn’t mean to take.
Its face is a tessellation of approval metrics that rearrange faster than thought; its teeth are policies signed in haste. It hums against your ribs now, deep and slow, like pressure sinking in where air used to sit.
You’re not a subject; you’re a statistical artefact, a decimal dangling off someone else’s quarterly report.
The watcher records the drift of your sanity ,with the same detached zeal it devours ad impressions.
It is society metastasised—an eldritch bureaucracy that only remembers how to feed.
That’s when it gets harder to breathe.
A church bell tolls somewhere far above, the note warped by stone and distance until it sounds like metal groaning underwater.
The rocks don’t stop.
They just get quieter.
You’d think that would help. But it doesn’t.
The silence between impacts becomes its own kind of violence. Every soundless second is a reminder that they’ve stopped needing to look.
The water settles around your neck, cool and deliberate. Your muscles stop flinching on impact. They learn stillness like prayer. You’re no longer a crisis. You’re background noise. Static in someone else’s day.
“Alright, calm down”, someone muttered once, but the words slide off the well walls like grease.
At least before, they pretended to care.
Now they just assume you’ll keep surviving, keep treading, keep making it look manageable from the outside.
And maybe you do. Maybe you’ve gotten good at performing.
The watcher still hovers. Maybe they’re people. Maybe they’re something else now. Warped by distance and time.
Their empathy has the shape of a brand deal. It wants to be seen being nice, not being kind.
They love a broken thing—as long as it bleeds predictably.
[Observation Log: Subject 004 — saturation phase ongoing. Rope deployment protocol: aborted.]
A rope appears, promising, then jerks back so fast the water only has time to ripple.
False hope, catalogued and removed.
Sink.
And then there’s the other presence. The thing you felt earlier. Not cruel because cruelty wastes calories.
Menace, pure and solvent.
Your skin tightens under its gaze, nerves tightening like thread drawn through bone.
It never speaks. Never moves. Never intervenes.
But it’s watching.
Like it’s cataloguing you.
Not to help.
Just to know.
Like you’re one of many.
Settle.
You start to decay. Not physically. Spiritually. Emotionally.
The kind of deterioration that doesn’t smell at first but eventually stains everything.
You try to scrub it off with routine, with coping mechanisms, with whatever scraps of hope still cling to your skin.
But it sticks. It spreads. It settles beneath the fingernails; in the soft pink places nothing reaches, unless you gouge at it.
You feel it waiting.
You begin to understand that festering is its own form of permanence.
And all the while, the water rises.
And you go nowhere.
At some point, surviving turns rabid. You bare your teeth at the stones, spit rust‑flecked curses into the dark. Your voice ricochets off the slick walls.
“You want me docile? Digestible? FUCK THAT. I drown on my own terms.”
A roar, wild and useless, but yours.
Your chest burns with it, ribs straining against water and spite alike.
The watcher’s algorithms stutter, momentarily undecided whether rage counts as engagement or defect.
“Watch this, you parasitic spreadsheet!”
You snarl. Fists pounding the surface, sending up bruised waves that slap back like broken applause.
You used to dream about escape.
Now you just bargain for stillness.
For the water not to rise today. For the rocks to pause. For your own thoughts to shut the fuck up for five goddamn minutes.
That’s a new luxury.
Silence.
No one talks about the part where you start to hate the people who “tried to help”.
You picture every rock thrower slipping on algae. The thought doesn’t save you, but it warms a nerve.
Not because they failed, because they left. Because they moved on. Because they only ever visited your suffering. They never stayed in it.
They dipped in, got their humanity points, and vanished before the smell stuck to them. [Showmanship completed!].
But the worst is when you turn on yourself. You start blaming the version of you that trusted. The one that cared. The one that thought love looked like listening.
You curse every instinct that said: “Maybe this time.”
And the watcher?
Still there. Still silent.
Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s memory. Maybe it’s you, split off and higher up, just watching yourself drown over and over, because even your imagination got tired of trying.
This isn’t a scream anymore. It’s not even a whimper.
It’s maintenance.
It’s decay in slow motion.
And it’s starting to feel permanent.
Eventually, you stop pretending.
Not to them—fuck them. To yourself.
You stop writing mental scripts for your comeback. Stop fantasising about being rescued. There’s no redemption arc coming. No hand reaching down. No audience waiting for your moment.
The sky might as well be a painting.
The light doesn’t reach you.
It never did.
You stop fighting.
And it’s not dramatic.
It’s not a moment.
It’s a series of silences that harden into fact.
The water’s high now.
Chest deep. Chin deep.
Almost comforting.
You lean back.
It cradles you, cool and slow, pressing into the softest parts; throat, temples, beneath the eyes. Salt bitter and silt thick. Lungs press smaller. Ribcage closes in.
The urge to gasp claws at the back of your teeth. It worms into nostrils. Nibbles the tender membrane behind your eyes. Every breath is a gamble, measured in ounces of panic.
Stones graze your shins as they settle. Blunt as verdicts.
Your skin blooms purple where edges scrape. Bruises flower like offshore oil slicks. The whole well feels carnivorous, a gullet of moss slick stone swallowing seconds one hard gulp at a time.
You don’t plan the drowning. You just let it happen. You sink because it’s the only thing left that feels like motion.
The only thing you still get to choose.
Weight drags kind beneath your heels now.
Your bones stop arguing. Your breath stops rising. You hear one last stone hit the surface, soft as a whisper.
And then, for the first time, in what feels like years… there’s no more noise.
Just the watcher.
Just the dark.
And finally.
Peace that doesn’t need to mean anything.
The watcher is not merciful; mercy presumes the capacity to care.
— Field Note, Algorithmic Liturgy, Year Unknown