"The Weight of Stillness" by Eva Jara

The rain hadn’t stopped for days. The world outside my window looked washed out — streets glistening with puddles, trees bending under the water’s weight, the sky heavy with gray. My room smelled faintly of damp air and water, the hum of the radiator competing with the steady rhythm of my breath. I sat at the edge of my bed, watching water droplets race down the glass, counting the seconds between droplets of water. It was here, in this small, dim corner of the world, that I began to notice how still everything felt — how still I felt.

In the quiet of the room, a mirror watched me. It had memorized the way my shoulders fell inward, the way my eyes drifted from droplets to the storm. It reflected my body but not any warmth—like a ghost that forgot how to fill my own outline. Sometimes, it caught the faint shimmer of the fog as I exhaled, as if embarrassed to be witnessed by something so silent. The mirror wished it could shatter, just to show me how I was feeling.

I measured my life in breaths. Each inhale, a small rebellion. Each exhale, a surrender. The thud of my body hitting the bed was a repeated sound — an empty pulse. Every day was the same, a cycle of reaching for some kind of feeling. A good feeling.

The storm kept tightening around the house; for days, it’s been raging, and the entire world feared what it promised. Its voice grew sharper as the hours passed. Lightning flickered through the room like someone flipping the world’s light switch on and off, trying to catch me in a moment I couldn’t hide. The rain pounded the roof so loudly it became its own kind of heartbeat, one I couldn’t sync with. I felt like if I stepped outside, the wind would take me whole —carry me away like a loose leaf, unnoticed.

When it first found me a month earlier, it was only a pause. An ocean to black out noise, and as I floated, the entirety of life seemed to quiet. Even the whispers of the world were drowned in the stillness of the water. As the world around me faded, I had a steady breath. I was floating in an ocean of my own reflections. Not here, but there, untouched.

But I began to delay trips back to the surface. The water became an aid, then a necessity. The stillness stopped being a comfort; it became the only nourishment I craved. I told myself it was harmless, just temporary. I could stop at any moment. Yet, with each passing day, my reality retook its discord. It seemed the world itself couldn't spin without it. It was stuck motionless, and I was trapped with it.

That week, the storm grew worse. Streets started closing, drains overflowed, and neighbors’ voices echoed faintly through the rain as they rushed to move their cars or tape their windows. Even from my room, I could hear the chaos —sirens, shouting, the slam of doors, fighting wind. But all of it felt far away, happening on some distant shore I no longer lived on. My mother moved through the house with a kind of frantic purpose, unplugging lamps, checking flashlights, urging me gently to stay awake, stay awake. But I felt like a ghost wandering a house that was preparing for a disaster I couldn’t feel anymore.

That night, it broke me. The air was thick, heavy, refusing to move from my chest to my head. I tried to find the still that always calmed me, but my mind remained paused. The floor was cold beneath me, the walls blurring, my body trembling around the ghost of that familiar pause. I wasn’t floating anymore — I was sinking.

Outside, the storm hit its peak. The power flickered once, twice, and then the room fell into darkness so complete it felt like a physical thing pressing in on me. Thunder cracked so close it shook the floorboards under my palms. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if the trembling belonged to the storm or to me. The house groaned from the pressure of wind pushing against it, each gust like a warning that the world was tearing at its edges. I remember thinking the storm was going to rip the roof off before I could take my next breath.

As I began to close my eyes and prepare for an eternity of water, she found me. My mother saw me and what I had become. My chest hollow, my hands trembling around an invisible promise I had clutched onto tight. You cannot breathe when you're sinking, and I was now drowning. The stillness that had carried me now threatened to suffocate me, and I could never persist.

She burst into the room like she was pushing through the storm itself, her silhouette outlined by the dim emergency lights we’d plugged in hours ago. Rain hammered the windows behind her so violently that it looked like the glass might give. But she didn’t look back at it — she looked only at me. While the world outside roared and cracked, she knelt beside me with a steadiness the wind couldn’t touch.

She paused, as she knew the storm was not near over. Her presence filled the room with strength, but was not overbearing — it was calm, just as the steadiness of her breath. She never flinched from the thunder surrounding her. The curse of time had weathered her face, but the experience it came with had softened it. Her mind was a map of both hurt and love. She spoke gently, but with weight around every word, as if she had lived through her own stillness once and refused to let it claim me too.

Her voice cut through the crash of waves — frantic, scared, real. I wanted her to wash just as the entire world seemed to have done, but she remained still by my side. She called my name again and again to make me realize how long it had been since I’d really heard it. Her hands found my shoulders, and I gasped, choking on water that had poisoned my lungs. My body didn’t remember how to breathe. Every inhale burned, every exhale came jagged and uneven, like I was learning to exist all over again. As I laid there, clinging to her, the waves began to backwash.

She spoke to me, screaming, “Breathing is never a weakness. It’s a surrender in the right direction. You can choose to come up for air. Choose to for me.” At that moment, the storm began to clear.

I gasped. My mother stayed close —not hovering, just breathing beside me, steady and patient. From that day, I realized I was not too far. If I wanted to still be here, with her, I needed to make that choice. Over time, she helped me find peace in the little things, and slowly, I found rhythm again.

I still measure life in breaths, but not in the feeling, in the meaning. Each inhale carries the ache of trying again. Each exhale releases the weight I used to crave. Stillness still finds me sometimes, whispering tales of an eternal peace, but now, the weight of stillness no longer sinks me; it has inspired me to rise. Even when it hurts, even when the water closes over your head. Because even when you’re swimming, you can still find air.