The Ocean

When he meets her, she is an ocean.

He has always loved oceans. When he was a child, he wanted to live in one. People don’t live in oceans, his mother said. How would you breathe? But he still wanted to. He could find a way, he knew it.

He’d never seen an ocean before except in pictures. He lived in a desert, but he loved to imagine what the sand might feel like when saturated with water. His mother caught him pouring the contents of his waterskin on the ground once, and he was sent to bed without supper for wasting such a precious thing. But it wasn’t a waste. Before she had caught him, he’d actually felt the wet sand between his fingers, had held it in his hands, and despite his empty stomach, he went to bed satisfied. He would remember the feel of that wet sand forever, and one day he would hold it in his hands once more, whole fistfuls of it. And one day he would live in an ocean.

He is not a child anymore and still he remembers the wet sand he once held, yearns to hold it again. He tells his mother he is going to walk around for a while, walk until he finds an ocean. And so he walks. He walks for days and months and years, and when he gets tired of walking he sits in libraries and bookshops. He has read every book there is to read on the ocean, on its creatures and its plants, on ways humans have invented to travel on and in it. He has read them so many times he can recite them by heart, and does so whenever he feels anxious. Whenever he worries he might never see an ocean. He is reciting Creatures of the Deep and cursing the endless stretch of desert and the way sand always gets into his shoes when suddenly his right shoe is soaked through, his foot cold and wet. And just like that, there she is. An ocean. His ocean.

She is so tranquil and alluring, but he cannot see more than her surface from the shore so he takes off his shoes and socks and rolls his trousers up to his knees and he wades into her shallows. Every step he takes is careful and soft but still he causes ripples, an endless expanse of ripples. And with every step, every ripple, he discovers something new. The softness of the sand under his feet, for example. Or the seashells lying half-buried every few feet, just waiting for their unique beauty to be uncovered. He slips his favorites into his pockets and strokes their edges with his thumb. He wants to put them on his dresser when he gets home, that he might look at and treasure them always, maybe even showing them off when he has company.

He wades out further and further until he’s up to his chest in her, but he cannot stop and so he takes a breath and dives completely under. It’s difficult to hold his eyes open as he swims and he frequently has to rush back up to the surface to gasp another lungful of air, but there’s just so much to see, and he needs to see it all. There are crabs scuttling from small rock to small rock, raising their claws at him in warning. There are urchins crawling along on their spines, moving in ways it looks they should not be able to move. He sees anemones, their bright tendrils flowing in the current one moment, then retracted in an instant as he brushes them with his finger; he does not mind the sting. He sees sea stars of every color you could possibly imagine, and in some you can’t, colors that no one had ever discovered before, just as no one had ever discovered this ocean before. He sees schools of brightly colored fish swimming just beyond him, clouds of neon green and blue and red and orange he could see but never touch. But there’s more beyond his field of vision, dark shapes moving around that he can’t quite make out. He wants to discover them, but his muscles ache and his lungs burn and he’s chilled to the bone, and while he would not object to drowning in her depths, there is so much of her that he does not yet know and he wants, he needs to know all of her.

He has long ago memorized all of the boat-building books, and he builds a boat on her shore. A trawler. There are trawlers for sale, but he builds this one piece by piece. He shapes and sands each wooden plank and nail, making sure everything fits together absolutely perfectly, because this boat is an extension of himself, the one piece of him that can live in his beautiful ocean even if his body could not, and nothing but his best is fit for her waters. He works on the trawler during his every waking moment, save for the first and last hour of each day, which he always devotes to swimming as far and as deep as he can, exploring as much of her as possible, and at night he sleeps on her shore.

He does not count the days he spends building the trawler, but there comes a day when it is finished. It stands tall and proud, sturdy and seaworthy. It sits far up on the beach, beyond the in-tide’s reach (although the tide is not in now), but now that it is finished he heaves it slowly across the sand until it sits just within the water’s edge. He scales the side of the boat using footholds he built in for this specific purpose and stands on the deck, waiting for her to sweep him up in her arms, the rising tide.

When he and his trawler are swept out to sea and the shore becomes smaller and smaller until he can no longer see it at all and every which way he turns is nothing but ocean for as far as his eye can see, he finally feels free – no longer tethered to land, to the arid desert of his former life; it is as if he has died and been reborn amid the waves. He whoops and hollers and dances around the deck. He has food and water to last him several months, and fishing supplies and a desalinator for when his supply runs out; he has books and journals and pencils and pens. He has a scuba suit and a compressor to refill his air tanks every night. He has everything he needs, and he is never going back.

She is so different here, in the middle of the ocean, than she was when he was swimming from the shore. Her water is a deeper, richer blue, and the creatures swimming all around him are different and more, so much more. Only a handful of different species lived as close to shore as he was forced to stay, but here, here there must be hundreds of different types of creatures, or thousands. By the surface they are small and brightly colored, but the further down he goes the bigger and murkier they become.

He swims through huge forests of kelp, marveling at the size of each plant, all of which rose far up above his head to the surface and stretched down, down, down so that he could not even see their roots through the inky blackness of the waters below. Eels, long and slithery and kelp-colored, liked to lurk in the kelp forests; they would creep out unseen as he swam past and quick as a flash they’d wind their long, twisty bodies through and round his legs, so that they became a figure-eight, each loop of the eight trapping one of his legs, and then they’d squeeze him tight and try to nibble on his toes. But rubber flippers do not make a very good meal for an eel, and if they had human faces they’d scrunch them up with their tongues sticking out the way you would if your mother tried to feed you beets or Brussels sprouts or mung beans. But as eels do not have human faces to scrunch up with their tongues sticking out, they’d just shake their head two or three times, unwind themselves from his legs, and slink back into the kelp to find something tastier on which to munch to get the taste of flipper out of their mouths.

Past the kelp forests, he discovers huge hulking fish that look like boulders, but who had powerful jaws that would clamp onto unsuspecting passersby in an instant and never let go. They could close their jaws quickly, but everything else about them was slow, so if they missed with their initial sneak-attack their prey would escape before they could so much as open their mouths again and they would have to settle back into their clump of rocks and crank their jaws slowly open again and wait for something else to swim by. He is very nearly bitten by one the first time he comes across them, the fish’s massive maw missing him by a fraction of an inch when he twists slightly to look at a school of passing fish a few feet away. He is careful of all rock formations after that, and soon becomes proficient at detecting at a glance whether he is looking at rock or fish. Some days he brings bits of food with him and tosses them to the rockfish; then, while they are busy consuming his offering, he swims up for a closer look, and sometimes he can even stroke them for a time before they began to stretch their jaws wide again, preparing to strike.

There are giant cephalopods too, who are playful rather than menacing, although their play is often dangerous for him. They have many flailing tentacles, too many to keep his eyes on all at once, and they like to try to grab him with the ones he isn’t watching. They distract him with a mesmerizing dance, tentacles swaying like kelp in the current, or by juggling small rocks or shells or hermit crabs, and then a stray tentacle winds itself around his ankle and quick as lighting the cephalopod zooms through the water, dragging him behind. Sometimes they toss him like a child tosses a ball into the air for a game of catch with themselves, except the cephalopods have to catch him on the up-toss and drag him down again so they can throw him up once more since he is too buoyant in the water to fall like the ball. Sometimes he enjoys these games and laughs as the cephalopods make him their plaything, but sometimes they make him dizzy and sick, or his tank runs low on air, and he has to make a quick getaway the moment their tentacles are no longer wrapped around him.

Day after day he dons his scuba gear and plunges into the ocean’s depths, observing the eels and the fish and the cephalopods and more, observing everything there is to observe. He stays within her for as long as he possibly can, until his all of his air tanks are depleted of every last drop save what he needs to return to the surface. Some days he cannot bear to tear himself away and he stays for longer than he should, and he has to hold his breath for the last several struggling kicks to the surface, and he emerges gasping and panting and thrilled. Once he surfaces and clambers back onto his trawler, he carefully hangs up his wet suit, sets his air tanks to refill, and begins documenting his dive.

He writes notes on the behaviors of the creatures he’s seen, or how certain types of rock always form the same patterns, or how the currents were moving that day. He draws illustrations of any new creatures he’s seen, and diagrams of how he thinks they must work inside. He revises previous entries with new insights, often needing to completely redraw his illustrations and diagrams as he learns new things about his aquatic companions. In the back of his journal, he is drawing a map of her, documenting each new area as he explores it until finally he will have her perfect portrait, so great in likeness it might as well be a photograph, only more intimate.

In the morning, he steers his little trawler to a new patch of ocean and begins it all again.

He has not counted the days spent within her, but he knows her inside and out, knows everything about her. He knows every single creature that lives in her depths, every single plant that grows in her sand, every single wall and cave and pebble and seashell in the entire ocean, in the entirety of her. He knows and loves all of her. She is his world. He loves her more than he can stand, and he hates that he can’t live in her forever. He hates that he can’t breathe under her surface unless he sticks a tank of oxygen on his back and a mask over his face. He hates how he can’t just let her envelop him completely, let her water fill his lungs with life instead of death. He envies the fish that dance around him every time he dives into her, as if taunting him: “Look at us, look at us, we don’t have to leave!”

He catches several of the fish in jars and brings them aboard his boat. It is easy; they trust him, he who has spent so much of time among them, and they swim obligingly into his open jar and let him close the lid. They’re beautiful. Their colours are even more vivid without so much water diluting the sun’s rays. Up close and with better light, he is able to see all the intricacies of their shapes, as well. All the delicate ruffles in their fins, how many hundreds of minuscule scales they each have, each so lovely on its own, and how perfectly they all interlock to make up an even more beautiful whole. They move so gracefully even in their agitation in their tiny jars, ruffled fins swishing this way and that. He watches their every move for days on end, barely eating, barely sleeping, barely even blinking, so intently does he watch them. And when he can learn no more from his observations, he takes them out of their jars, one at a time, lays them on the table, and watches them as they flip-flop about, tiny sides heaving as they gasp for breath, their frantic eyes locked on the water-filled jars that once held them captive, yes, but alive. He watches them as they struggle to make their way across the table and back to the jars, as they throw their small bodies against the glass, desperate attempts to fling themselves back into her water. He does not blame them; he wants what they want: to submerge himself in her water and draw a life-saving breath. He watches each fish as their struggles subside, as their sides heave for the final time, and then he slices them open. He dissects them one by one with increasing skill, marking down all important data and drawing several diagrams for reference, and several times he needs to dive back into her to collect more fish, a task that becomes harder with each successive dive as the little creatures, once so friendly and trusting, will no longer come within arm’s length of him, as if they know what fate awaits those that get caught in his jars. He fills notebook after notebook after notebook with notes and diagrams and questions to research later when he is no longer scalpel-deep in a fish, and the answers to those questions as soon as he is able. It takes him weeks or months or years, he still does not count, but at long last his research is complete and he manages to build for himself from pilfered parts and stolen life that which he desires above all else: a fully-functional set of gills.

The process of attaching the gills was one far simpler in theory than in practice. It takes numerous attempts and leaves several future scars, but he finally manages it. He has gills. Gills. He considers briefly keeping his lungs as well, but what’s the point? With gills, he can live in her forever, never needing to return to the surface. And if it weren’t for the necessity of it, he knows he would have stopped surfacing long, long ago. So he removes his lungs, which gets a bit complicated at the end, as he is performing the operation out of water and it’s rather difficult to stitch everything back up without being able to breathe. The stitches might not be pretty, but he’s finally finished. He places his old lungs in a box which he slides under his bed – a keepsake, like a cherished childhood toy one has outgrown but can’t quite bear to part with. He takes one last lap around his ship, making sure everything is in its place, before returning to the bedroom. There, he takes off all his clothes, folding each item as he removes it, and piles them neatly on the edge of the bed.

Finally, naked and nearly blue in the face, he steps onto the ship’s rail. He stands there for a moment, arms outstretched, ready to give himself to her completely. He was always hers, from long before he met her, from back when oceans were just a fairytale he couldn’t help believing. It took him so long, but he was finally able to mold himself into the perfect specimen for her, the perfect creature to live in her forever. He did everything for her, and now, as soon as he stepped off the ship’s rail, she would be able to cradle and nourish and love him forever, as wholly as he loved her.

He waits until he can’t not breathe a single second longer. He wants his first breath of her to be significant. He closes his eyes, lifts his right foot off the rail, and lets his weight tumble forward, ready for her to catch him, to breathe life into him. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

It never comes. He’s falling but her water never catches him. He opens his eyes, wants to look at her, to ask her why she’s not catching him.

There is no water. There are no fish. No sea creatures at all, or plants or rocks or seashells. His ship is gone, his clothes are gone, his lungs are gone. For a minute, he thinks his eyes are gone as well. There is only inky blackness around him. But no, look, there’s a tiny glimmer in the distance. And another, and another. They’re all around him, these tiny pinpricks of light in the distance. And as his eyes adjust, he realizes the air around him isn’t black at all, but full of blues and purples and pinks and greens. All the colors he recognizes, for he lived with them for years. They are the colors of the ocean and all that lived within it. But it’s not an ocean at all. She’s not an ocean at all.

She’s a galaxy. He doesn’t know why he could never see it before. And as he floats in her space, he wishes he could explore her as a galaxy rather than an ocean. There’s so much he misunderstood, so much he wants to understand now. She does not speak, but still her words fill him. He had his chance, she says. He had all the time in the universe to see her, but all he chose to see was an ocean.

But I did everything for you, he says.

No.

I gave myself gills just to live in you, he says.

But what good are gills when I was never made of water?