When duty feels like drowning, but there’s no one left to do what has to be done, a man finds he grows gills. He starts breathing underwater. The water starts to feel like home. It doesn’t feel heavy anymore. Like a sensation that’s been there forever, a smell, or something touching his leg, he stops noticing.
A man only feels wet when it’s raining. He doesn’t feel wet when he’s submerged.
He stretches his arms and legs. He practices slow, soft strokes. He gets tired, but even the tiredness is like water. The feeling goes away. It dims and dims, until it goes away entirely.
Sometimes, he’ll move too quickly, and then he feels the water’s resistance. The pressure is back. The drowning is back, but it doesn’t last for long. He gets tired of moving quickly, takes a deep breath of water, and slows down again.
He finds the spaces between his hands are webbed over. Maybe they’ve always been like this, and he hadn’t noticed, but he’s noticed now. Moving in the water feels like the most natural thing in the world. Slow movements. Steady movements.
Eventually he’ll be halfway through, but he doesn’t know he’s halfway through. There’s more water above and below that he can look through. The sunlight can’t penetrate the water, but he also can’t see what’s on the other side. Every memory of a time before water has disappeared, and all he remembers is the water.
This is the easiest part. When the memory before the water isn’t there. It’s hidden away, and the difference between water and no water is gone. That’s when moving through is the only thing he’ll do. He doesn’t pity himself. He just moves.
If he moves long enough, it’ll get brighter again. Suddenly, there’s more water behind him than ahead. He understands that moving through the water was the only way to get to where he’s going. Moving becomes easier, not because the water’s gotten lighter, but because he can feel what it’ll be like when it is lighter. He starts to feel happier than he felt before there ever was any water, even though there’s water now.
Eventually, if he doesn’t stop moving, even to the end, he makes it out. This new duty doesn’t feel like drowning anymore. Maybe the burden is gone, or maybe he just got better at doing it. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that the next time he feels like he’s drowning, it’ll be familiar, and the gills will already be there.