An entry from our Summer Reading competition.

IT’S like standing in a storm, dark clouds and deep thunder that sound like men when they’re mad.

Rain so heavy that when the drops hit your skin it burns from the weight.

Air so cold you’ve lost all feeling.

It’s like being cemented in the sand, willing to move so intensely but nothing happens still. 

Watching a 50-foot tidal wave build and grow and swell in front of you, every cell in your body telling you to run out of the way but you just can’t.

Your heart sinks into the depths of you and you squirm with anticipation because you know exactly what it feels like, you’ve done it so many times, but that doesn’t make it any easier. 

The wave falls and crashes and curls over you, having no care you’re even there.

Your limbs flail around you, your hair goes wild around you and the water doesn’t even notice. Your feet stay solid in the sand. 

You try to take those deep, steady breaths that everyone keeps telling you to take but the cold, salty water fills you.

Fills your eyes and ears. Fills your nose and throat.

Fills your lungs and saturates your skin until you’re unsure when you end, and it begins. Once it is inside of you, that’s it.

It will rot you from the inside out.

It won’t make you feel like you’re in a void, it makes you the void, sucking life and energy from those around you for it to disappear. 

You go on as you did feeling the water slosh and swirl inside of you.

Sometimes you forget it’s there. Until the salt rises in your throat. 

Or you’re standing in front of the wave again.

by BAILEY WRIGHT