It's Going Swimmingly

Your corpse clings to you, one cold hand locked rigor-tight around your ankle. Forget that leg, kick with the other one, ignore the dead weight. Ha ha ha. Stop reaching for the surface with your hands like there's a ledge up there or something to grab, make paddles with them the way you were taught in fifth grade and there's no kicking off the bottom now, kiddo.

Use paddles on water
(I don't see any water)
Use paddles on ocean
(I don't see any ocean)
Use paddles on sea
(I don't see any sea because sea is all there is, the same way you don't see europe from basingstoke)

breathe

Except don't breathe, because to start breathing here would be to start dying. Surface. Ignore the cold hand around your ankle and that blubbery little chuckle, your corpse is dead and doesn't know shit about how badly you want this. Broad strokes with the arms, a perfect curve. Kick harder. Focus on the surface and don't

Breathe

because even though you have to you can't afford the effort it would take to choke. Force the hands downwards, kick with your free leg, let frenzy fuel it, closer now close enough to see the foam on the surface let the fear in you need fumes to run on and your tank ran dry too quickly you don't want to die here and that should be enough

BREATHE

just two more feet, your hands suddenly flailing free of resistance and your head out of the water and you gasp in, one long clear breath, and you'd sob if you could but you can't. Air. Air in great, vast quantities, salty and clean.

breathe.

Kick, hard, because your death is still clinging to your ankle and won't let go. Then look around, and see nothing on the horizon, and know there is nobody coming to help you and all you have left is this weight, this weight that will pull you down if you take a moment's rest. Eventually, you will have to try to rest because when you can’t distinguish your movements from each other, when you’ve made the same hard slog of the arms and the legs and the arms and the legs so often it feels like clockwork it’s going to happen. One of those mundane little movements will prove to be too much for you and you give yourself a moment’s rest and then your corpse has you, has always had you, drags you down by the ankle and never lets you go.

At the bottom of the sea, your corpse will ask you if you want to live and you will answer that you do, and you will kick for the surface again. And again. And again.