Imagine you are drowning and Europe is looking away

A boat is quietly sliding over the soft water stuffed with numerous bodies. Young men with visions, strong mothers pregnant or with child and elderly with dreams.

The moonlight makes your dark skin lustrous. Your clothes are thick yet you are shaking in the cold.  Your eyes are sharp yet you will miss what is about to come.

One wave. The power of the sea. That is all it takes for your boat to capsize. A trunk full of souls gulped down by the hungry mouth of the darkness.

You never learned how to swim, you never thought about dying so young. The cold water hugs you, drags you, swallows you. You are shaking. You are panicking. You are trying to gasp for air but there is only the cold water around you. Adrenaline shoots through your veins. SWIM. SWIM. SWIM. You reach the surface and you catch your breath. Your lungs fill with oxygen. You feel relief. One look around shows your companions drowning. The body of the toddler who was sitting next to you is floating motionless between bags and shoes. Some try to swim and reach the land but they are too far away to make it. The only hope is rescue. Will it come? In the middle of the night the hope of help is small. How long will you be able to fight the cold, the anxiety and the sorrow?

Another wave. You are under water again. You try to look around but the ocean is too nervous to be able to see. I WANT TO BREATH, scream your lungs. I WANT TO SEE, screams your brain. I WANT TO LIVE, screams your heart.

Your mother is sitting at home. Right in this moment she is thinking about you. She is thinking, hoping and praying her son will come back to her. She wishes only the best for her child. She never asked him to leave yet he did. He did it to make her proud. To have a better future for his children. To one day come back and make a difference. But soon nobody will remember his ambitions.

You are tired. Your sight starts to become cloudy. Your muscles cramp and your lungs fill up with water. The pain is unbearable. You have saved money for years only so you can suffer greatly. You try to fight, you try to not give up. Nobody is hearing your choked screams.

Your mother will cry yet she will never know you died in the colds of the sea. Friends will joke and hope you made it yet your body is rotting in the depths of the ocean.

Nobody will ever know you died that day. There will not be a body to burry nor a grave to cry on. The earth keeps rotating and life goes on and on only you will not be part of it anymore. You will share your grave with thousands of cold bodies.

Why all this misery? Because the people who have everything do not want to give or share anything. Europeans, wake up! What about humanity? We would not lose a bit by sharing what we have. We are sitting in front of our televisions with chocolate and ice creams while a child is drowning. We are laughing with friends in a bar while a young woman takes her last breath and vanishes in the sea with her unborn child. We are crying over bad grades and missed busses while thousands of mothers do not even know their beloved children are deceased. What right do you have to look away?

What makes you better than others?

Imagine your family on this boat and slowly drowning. Would you care then?

Rina Tiyu