I grew up near the ocean. If the roads weren’t so dangerous, it’d take me 10 min to get to the beach by bike. 5 with a car. 30 by foot. During the winter, the wind would carry the sand all the way to my doorstep. Ever since I was a kid, I learned I had to respect the ocean. The Atlantic wasn’t hostile with unpredictability. You knew it was dangerous from the waves it had, the sheer force of impact that could make a full-grown man fall, even if it only hit his ankles. And the cold. It was so cold that your nerves would give up for a second, before making you feel like someone was trying to break every part of your body that was submerged.
So, I know it’s dangers. If I’m honest, I didn’t care. I wasn’t the biggest fan of swimming or going to the beach, with my body image issues and the sheer boredom I felt there. But every now and again, I’d go in there. If the waves were weak and the sun warm, I’d go for a couple of dives to cool off from the blistering heat.
I was never afraid of the ocean. Weary, yes. I didn’t have any plans on drowning, so I respected the ocean. But I wasn’t afraid of it. I had heard of thalassophobia, the fear of the ocean as this unknown, unexplored and uncontrollable force of nature that could never be tamed; but I didn’t have such fears.
One day I decided to go for a swim. And I had the craziest idea. “How deep can I go?”. How deep could I go within the ocean? I had been training my lung capacity, I could swim for about a minute. Maybe minute and a half, if I was organised and smart. How deep could I go? I wanted to find out. So, I went to the dark blue part of the ocean, the part where you could feel a switch in temperature, as if the body of water was warning you of what was below. And I dived.
In the beginning, it didn’t feel odd. As I went further down, the coldness increased. Then a slight change in pressure, enough to make your ears feel uncomfortable. Then silence, as all of the world around you was quiet. And then sound.
I opened my eyes, something I’d never do because of the salt, and I was deeper than I thought. Deeper than it made sense. I couldn’t see the light above me. I couldn’t see the ground below me. And in front of me, I saw something. It was huge. Its vastness filled the ocean, and I couldn’t see its ends. It had one eye, a huge and dead eye. And it looked at me. And suddenly, I understood the universe. Life, death, war, greed, peace, love, hate, despair, everything, nothing. I understood it all. I couldn’t stop to process this information, it was as if I had suddenly understood a new language without learning it and translating it to my mother tongue was impossible. I just understood.
And within all the noise of this omniscience, all the noise of zero and infinity, I heard a voice. Its voice. I got closer, closer to it, to them. And as I did, the knowledge became too much. I was understanding the vastness of the universe, I was understanding something more ancient, more primordial than life or death. I tried swimming away, but I couldn’t. I… I had to understand them.
They sounded like my father. It reminded me of an old movie my dad and I watched when I was younger. It was about a submarine that drowned. The crew was all together, in a pressurized chamber. And as they went further and further down, the submarine would break. Until they hit the bottom. They were alive. They lived. And as days went by and turned to weeks, they lived. The captain began to chant something, something the crew took a bit to understand. When they finally did, one of the mates repeated it: “That which is dead, can never truly die”. The captain sat down against the walls of the chamber and kept repeating the sentence. And one by one, the crew followed. Eventually the walls breached, and water flooded in. And yet, they kept repeating, even as their lungs filled with salt water. “That which is dead can never truly die”. And as their bodies decomposed, as the sea life feasted on them, they kept chanting. “That which is dead can never truly die”.
And now, as I came closer to this being, to this entity that went far beyond the beginning of the cosmos, I heard it speak. In my father’s voice. I heard what it was saying.
And I repeated. As the bubbles of precious air escaped my mouth, as I saw them float to the surface, to safety, I repeated as this god said. “That which is dead, can never truly die”. And it opened its eye. What I had seen before, was its eyelid covering its eye. And now I saw the end. The end of time, the end of life, the end of death. I saw god die, I saw god kill himself in pain and fear. I saw fear. And fear, saw me,
A current started lifting me up. And in my mind, I could hear it. I heard it smile, I heard it pleased. And somehow, that scared me more.
I’m in my room now. And even though it is my fingers that write this letter to you, even though I can feel the keyboard, this isn’t me. This body isn’t mine. It took it. It wants you to read this. It wants you to know it is there.
So do not worry for me, my dear friend. Do not worry, for even though I am dead, I know that that which is dead can never truly die.