The Ocean is intoxicating. It is a big heterogeneous mixture of water and salt and enough rusty pipes to fill the Smithsonian museum in Washington D.C., probably twice. It makes up almost 70% of the earth and contains over 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water which I can’t seem to wrap my head around. It is its own being, controlled by the celestial monarchy of the moon who declared himself king when the earth was born, but full of invisible microscopic organisms that make it come to life and have its own sort of invisible power. It holds 94% of all life on earth and seems to live and breathe along with the rest of us in one big mass of molecules.

I recently saw a picture of a man who was sitting in the middle of the ocean, with nothing around him but water and time when a large blue whale, with a heart the size of a Volkswagen, cruised underneath him, the outline of his body like a ghost’s skeleton. I could imagine myself sitting, as still as I could, the gentle tidal waves sliding beneath my boat as the whale passed by in harmony with its environment, and me at peace with this 70% of a new world, an unknown galaxy that did not belong to me. It made me want a heart the size of a Volkswagen so that I could love the sea with more than just a few vessels and it made me want to know the feeling of a ghost passing under or through my body like energy waves. I wanted complete tranquility.

I believe that the first time I ever achieved this complete peace, my own version of a cruising blue whale, was when I first saw the ocean.

I can’t say that I completely remember it but after several retellings from my stepmom it feels like my own memory, not clouded by 16 years of watching the current pull in and outwards. She had taken me there in some sort of desperate attempt to calm me down, making our way down onto the slopes of sand where it met the ocean when I saw it. I saw the 70% of the world I had been missing from birth and now I was watching some moon god invisibly and silently guide the waves into their places, as if a production was about to ensue. I was mesmerized by the way the foam stuck to the sea’s endless hands reaching out, the tips of their fingers a frothy white.

Being a child, I probably was only thinking about the raw nature of this world and the way grains of sand felt like the ground dancing to its own version of salsa but now, having experienced more that 70% of earth, I think back and I wonder what it was about this ocean, this mass of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, that excited me? Why could nothing calm my mind but the perpetual and cyclical movements of the currents that insisted on pulling people from left to right, all part of the moons monarchy? And why was it that I looked out and I was not terrified of this new lunar system that held 36,200 feet of microorganisms and tentacles, and fins, and whales with hearts the sizes of Volkswagens?

As I grew up, I began to fall that much more in love with the ocean, every time picturing my body as one of the souls amongst many, my energy sent off in waves to someone millions of miles away. I was unafraid of what was laid out in front of me because the overwhelming sense of excitement left no room for fear. I am not even sure I knew what fear was and just to spite every single Volkswagen heart in the sea I would stand, my back to the waves, eyes closed and fingers in my ears, waiting patiently for one to come creeping up behind me, the bigger the better, and push me into its waters, face down, tumbling through sand and sea. I loved the feeling of the unknown and the unsureness of where I was going and how the currents rippled through my hair, letting me know that there really was someone on the other side of the world sending me messages like our own sort of echolocation.

But then something happened.

I grew up.

I discovered percentage by percentage that the earth was not all gold crested waves and shallow water. That much of the life in the ocean is invisible to the naked eye and every time I’ve ever swallowed sea water I was gulping down one million bacteria as well. And as the excitement began to die down the fear I was lacking until now became deeply lodged in my gut and I was scared of those 36,200 feet of water. I grew a developing fear of sharks and sometimes when I closed my eyes with no one floating around me I could picture giant wales and teeth swimming beneath me, in cold dark waters that have never been explored.

The first time I came face to face with one of these creatures was at Hannah park.

With an extreme outdoors advocate for a mother, my cousins and I were always out somewhere doing something active, usually camping or swimming on some exotic beach somewhere. It was summer and this particular lake we decided to visit was not huge but went on long enough that it couldn’t be considered a pond. It was surrounded by cattails and sawgrass that appeared sporadically along either side, as if shaping it into its smooth edged winding form and after hauling our large orange kayak into the middle of nowhere, my mother and eldest cousin went to explore beyond vision, leaving my younger cousin and I to sit on a picnic table half submerged under water, a mixture of rotting wood and an ancient artifact.

I was still fascinated with water and the way it slipped through my fingers when I scooped it so I spent most of the time attempting to catch the ghostly outlines of fish and holding my breath just long enough to dive to the bottom and find things that were buried in the sand, mostly just cigarette butts and soda cans. My cousin and I raced to see who could find these hidden artifacts the fastest, plowing through the water like our own version of a blue whale cruising beneath a gently rocking boat, surrounded by water. Each dive for me was exploring the unknown. It was like draining the ocean of its power radiating off of 1966 bottle caps and toe rings swallowed whole. When I dove into nothingness I imagined that was what floating in space felt like; knowing no one existed in this realm but you—or maybe the even scarier thought, that something did.

On my final dive I reached my hand into the cool sand once again, 200 lightyears away, and immediately felt something run up my leg and then what seemed like a heavy weight or pressure of some kind rest in the bigger part of my thigh. Unsure at first of what it could be, I lifted my head above water to hear my cousin scream something inaudible and then I was scrambling to sit on top of the picnic table crying and watching my mother dip each edge of her oar into the dirty water below her, creating ripples in the smooth surface; an old man’s wrinkly mouth from laughing too much. I simply just sat there, with what felt like a lightning bolt swirling inside of my leg, helplessly trying to get my mother’s attention and watching the water below me for any movement; stuck.

A jelly fish has two stages of life: the polyp stage and the mobile medusa phase, and like humans they grow into the second stage as time progresses, except unlike us there is a certain kind of jellyfish, the Turritopsis nutricula, that is able to recede back into the past and return to the polyp stage when in a time of stress. I cannot determine what would worry a jellyfish so much so that it would need to regress into their former self, however, although I never saw what had clung to my leg, I wonder if it was this foreign Turritopsis nutricula reminding me that the ocean is not all it seems to be and if now some part of me is immortal. I wonder if the ocean gave me more than its soda cans and bottle caps, but placed just a fragment of its radiant beauty inside of my body so that in my own times of stress I could regenerate the past and go back: remember standing strong against the tides, my back to the ocean, waiting for a wave to swallow me whole and spit me out as if it knew I didn’t belong. Remember when I was fearless and not afraid of having a Volkswagen heart and loving too much.
But when I forgot that the ocean felt like the cold reaches or space or was all too aware of its dangers, I remembered this moment as the first time that I had a bad experience with the ocean. After that moment I can’t say what exactly happened but I believe scientists call it the firing off of synapses, electrical signals shifting between the brain.

I calling it learning something new.

I learned that the blue whale is the largest animal roaming the planet and sharks usually stayed far away from humans, but if you kick your legs they might mistake them for prey. 36,200 feet of water had a whole new meaning and the space beneath the sea felt all too inhabited by things that I shouldn’t know about. For about two months I stopped going in the ocean because I was afraid of sharks. Every time that I dove down into the water to find something in the sand, halfway there, with closed eyes, a rush of cold frothy sea coursed through my body and I imagined sharp rows of teeth sinking into my leg. I became suddenly aware of all 36,200 feet and scrambled up, panicking and gasping for air. The ocean had a different kind of power now—a power over me.
It was this fear, along with the subtle push of my stepmom, that helped urge me back into the waters I once loved, once again at peace with what laid below. I developed new knowledge, shedding my skin of what I had once known, and settled with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. Instead of seeing the surface of the water rippling with a graceful tension, I had submerged myself into the depths of its waters and come up with a pain I didn’t know was in this galaxy. I realized that the beauty of the water I had thought to be a pure frothy white, was deceptive. It was a world that might have been more elegant than mine but just as vicious.