When shipwrecks are discovered, marine archeologists often leave their bones on the sea floor, held delicately in place by the weight and weightlessness of the water. To disturb them, to raise them to the surface, would make them crumble to wet dust before returning to the sea floor. Instead, they scour the remains while dressed in rubber suits wearing reflective faces, careful not to ripple the water with too anxious fins as they search for everything or nothing at all.

I’ve watched them search and discover, and leave collections of remains countless times, not in the sea but in this lake. They’ve found sunken boats still stocked with picnic bags of long-rotted sandwiches soaked in brine. I’ve seen them search for bodies they only sometimes found. I’ve watched rings and other jewelry drop beneath the surface, their diamonds catching the sun as they fall to rest in the sand.

My lake is large. I’ve mapped its curves and trenches over and over, noting its subtle changes and shifts as the earth swells and settles, as the water dries with the warm weather and later in the season collects again within the basin, causing the weight of the surface to grow heavier on my body below. I no longer know how long I’ve been here; I stopped counting. I remember the day I sunk, though, and the sinking.

I can see myself walking on the shore, slipping timid toes through the surface of the water and below. I can feel his hand, my husband’s hand, slipping out of mine as I pull away and run into the water that slowly reaches up past my ankles, my legs, my torso, to my chin. I can see the beach as I pause to look back. My husband is still there, standing on the shore with our little girl cradled in one arm and waving to me with the other, smiling so wide that his eyes crinkle in their corners.

It’s the end of August. We’d spent the day at the lake, the three of us soaking up the last of the summer’s sun before our new season started—before work resumed, before our little girl would start school. We’d already picked out her first day clothes, set up her emergency contacts, bought her a tiny book bag still too big for her small shoulders to bear. I wave back to them with my one free arm, egg-beating my legs fast to stay afloat before snapping them back together. With a kick of my arms, I propel my body down into the deep of the water. Its cool rush hits my cheeks like ice, filling my hair, hugging my body at every curve of my flesh. I look up then through the water, opening my eyes to a kaleidoscope of shimmering light and color on the surface, twinkling like night stars blanketed not in darkness but in a cool blue hue. And I drift there, suspended for just a moment, embracing the weight of the water on my body, moving no muscle and holding a single gulp of air in my lungs for safe keeping.

And then I close my eyes again, eyelids cool where the lake water had stung my vision, and I scissor-kick my feet to bring my body back up to the surface. I kick my feet. I kick my feet. Furiously. I open my eyes to see the kaleidoscope’s colors have shifted, and I can no longer tell which shimmers of light are coming from the surface. I kick my feet. I push and pull at the water and realize that up and down feel the same in the deep water. I kick my feet. But the surface never comes, and I’ve never been able to find it again since.

I’ve tried to stop thinking about them now, but I never can. I’ve tried to forget how the warmth of the sun felt on my skin. To forget the sound of my laugh, his laugh, my little girl’s. As if leaving them in my memory would somehow set them free, too, wherever they are. I try not to wonder about her first day of school, her emergency contacts. Whether my little girl has grown into her book bag yet or substituted it for another. Still, I swim. I kick my feet. Though I’m not sure where to go.

In my lake, the skeletons of trees line the edge where the water once met the shore before the dam broke. That was years ago, though, before I got here. I remember it from the surface, when the waters flooded the town in the middle of the night and swept everyone away. It was a terrible mistake, a misstep and miscalculation, the newspapers said. And they didn’t dare drain the lake again afterward. They knew what they didn’t want to find. And now the homes and buildings that made up the town ache and moan with the water’s ebbs and flows. Now the town is sprinkled with the bones of people whose family and lovers had to stop looking for them.

I drift through their mausoleum, their resting place, delivering to them the messages I remember reading in the newspapers, the prayers and longings from family members who didn’t get to say goodbye. I pass by homes with shattered windows whose glass has turned back to sand and door frames that beckon for me to come in with their broken hinges. I see the silt that’s gathered along building edges, lawn chairs and pots for plants peeking out from beneath. Inside, through the windows, I see clothes laying limp and flattened with water; silverware and plates strewn from their cupboards, misplaced around the room but unbroken by the water’s hand. Photographs and their frames are bleached and rusted from salt. I used to be able to make out the faces in them, but now they are just light shadows in dark frames.

Occasionally I come across something valuable, personal, recognizable. A silver tray with initials and a date etched into the top. An album of photos with the family name printed in cursive script on the front. Once I even found a present, wrapped and bowed. I used to try to find a way to swim them back to the surface, to deliver them to waiting, reaching hands that I hoped would meet me there, but the surface and the shore were always just out of reach. The softer items would fade and fall to pieces in my hands as I swam up. The larger objects would become too heavy, the weight of the water pulling them from my hands, and I’d watch them drift and sway back to the bottom.

Shadows fall differently here. Below the water’s surface, they cascade and weave around the rays of light, dappled in the same way that the light falls through the branches of a pruned tree. They fall in layers until they mix with the dark below, until they fall far enough away from the sun that they no longer take any form at all.

At night, everything is in shadow. Some nights, the moonlight mimics the sun and shines into the water in whispers, but never deep enough that I can reach it. I’ve tried sometimes to find it, to use it as a guide showing me the way, finally, to the surface. I got close once. I could feel the pressure of the water lessen against my flesh and bones. I could feel my own weight heavy in the water’s current as I pulled myself higher, up and up. And then I felt it—first like the soft chill of a cool breeze on bare skin, and then as an ache and a sting. I paused to look at my arms floating in the water in front of me, to inspect them, and saw that my skin, my flesh was floating away from my bones like broken leaves from a tree in fall. My body was decomposing, falling apart in flakes without the water’s weight to hold it so delicately in place. I looked up and saw the darkness of both the sky and the lakebed reflected back at me. I saw the moon shimmering in crisp lines along the water’s surface, so close that I wanted to reach out and touch it. To feel the refreshing coolness of night air on my face. I drifted then, for a moment, and felt the heaviness of the lake around me. I closed my eyes and waited, without moving, for my body to fall again into the arms of the lake, to drift back into the equilibrium that holds me together.

I am the shipwreck. I am the drowned town. I too can only be excavated and explored from the safety of the bottom of the lake. To keep my flesh and bone as a body means remaining settled below the surface. So I’ve stopped trying to find a surface to return to. I’ve resolved to find a home for myself in the waters of my lake, to create a sun in the kaleidoscope of lights and colors. I move with the lake tides. The silt shifts below my feet. I watch as days and nights follow and elude one another, ceaselessly, overhead.

Summers have become my favorite. Floating in the in-between of the surface and the bottom of the lake through the noontime hours. Feeling the water slowly become warmed by the sun rays on the surface. I watch the daylight shift around boat bottoms that pass like clouds overhead, blocking the sun for just a moment and casting shadows that chase each other through the water in layers as they fall deeper.

Sometimes I watch people swimming overhead, little feet kicking and paddling around each other, never venturing far from their boats. Sometimes they jump from high above the surface and off boat edges, their toes piercing the water suddenly and their bodies falling into the deep, consumed by a cloud of bubbles. And for just a moment, they drift there, suspended in the water, in an equilibrium with me, near enough that I can almost see the crinkles of laughter on their faces. And in these moments their company in the cool waters reminds me what it feels like to be alone. In these moments they’re like me, I’m like them—a breath is still held tight in their lungs. And then with a swift kick, their bodies float back to the surface, following the cloud of bubbles, leaving me behind. I resist the urge to follow them; we are not the same. There is no breath left in my lungs. They can leave through the surface while I must stay behind. Until this last time.

The girl was young. She couldn’t have been much older than my own daughter must have been by now. And for a moment, when she jumped into the deep of the water and drifted there, suspended with a breath held tight, I thought she might be. She fell deeper into the water than most; I could see her face and features clear through the bubbles. Two eyes and a nose, crinkled and closed against the water while puffed cheeks and puckered lips held a gulp of air against her tongue. I saw her drift, tiny limbs reaching out like a starfish through the water toward the shores. Her hair fanned out around her head, shimmering with light from the sun. And I watched as her arms and legs kicked and pulled at the water, looking for something to push off of, for a way to propel her body back to the surface. The rhythm of her kicks and pulls were off beat, unpracticed. And then they became panicked as her body remained stuck in place. I tried to yell to her through the water to kick harder, to reach up, but a voice without air to carry it stays trapped in the throat, releasing as nothing more than a dull gurgle, a scream into a void.

I swam up toward her then, I kicked my feet to get closer as her body wriggled and stressed in the water. When I reached her, I ignored the ache that began to build beneath my skin and didn’t look as the flesh broke away from my bones like leaves in fall. I drifted before her for just a moment and saw her as a mirror—her face as mine, her hair and bones and body in perfect equilibrium with the tides. She stopped wriggling, her legs no longer kicked. I grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her, hard. I kicked my feet and pushed our bodies toward what I hoped was the surface. I looked up to see the sunrays casting kaleidoscope colors across my eyes and then the shadow of a boat passing by overhead. I hoped the surface was close because the water had started to feel like a warm bath, thick and soothing with sun. I kicked hard and looked back to see that the girl was still with me, her arm gripped in my hand, my fingers now reduced to bone, my wrists shining white and hard in the sun glint. I kicked hard and felt my hair fall down and off my shoulders left to float in the water behind us.

I could feel the joints between my bones begin to ache and break apart. I pulled the girl harder then and lifted her above me so that she rested between my body and the surface of the water. I pushed her up, toward the surface, her heels gripped in my palms, her body holding straight as an arrow aimed toward the sun. And then it happened, so suddenly, so subtly. The kaleidoscope of colors before me snapped together. The blues and yellows and greens came together to form a sun, sky, trees, a boat. I kicked hard and watched as the girl’s body broke through the surface of the water and was met by arms reaching out from all angles to pull her out and away from the water, from me. And in that moment, I felt my bones begin to break. I felt my body break apart into pieces before falling to the bottom of the lake, resting within the silt as dust and bone.