Beneath the Ocean’s Silent Road

On the way to the ocean, there is a road that disappears into the sand and gets swallowed up beneath the foam. It's only there if you aren't looking for it, and you can only travel along it if you don't know it's there. I walked it once and never again. It led me past the waves, out into the deep blue where the fish float instead of swim and the seaweed sways far beneath the surface, shifting against the current. I'd come to the beach alone that day, eager to spread out in the sunshine with a new book. I can't remember what the book was about, but it must not have been very good. That, or the pull of the ocean was just more intriguing.

I left the book splayed out on my towel, spine pulled taut, and I walked into the waves. I kept walking.

See, sometimes, there are paths we don't understand. But we have to travel them anyway. We have to know where they lead.

I still can't describe what I saw. Perhaps it was another world, a rip between universes that I was never supposed to know existed. Perhaps it was a dream, brought on by the heat of the day and the wild musings of my then-young mind. Perhaps it never happened at all.

But I remember a world colored in the blue-green light of the water. I remember stepping beneath the surface, eyes wide open without the sting of salt invading my every blink. The creatures I saw there were not of this earth: a strange and terrifying array of colors and forms that floated around me, beside me, above me. I walked along the sand for a long time, knowing even then that I would need to try to remember the things I saw here in this strange place. Knowing that I would never pass this way again.

I awoke on the beach in time to watch the sun sink below the waves, towel swirled around my ankles and my book sitting just where I'd left it on the sand, spine cracked and hardened from the day's heat. I rose slowly, a bit dazed, and gathered my things. Made the short walk back home.

It was years ago now. Life has changed for me since then, as it does. Good things, bad things. All come and gone. But that place not of this world, the place beneath the ocean's silent road, has stayed inside my head for all of it. I remember those flashes of colors that couldn't be named, those wisps of shimmering light and shifting patterns flowing and writhing beneath the waves.

It's possible it was never real. It's possible I made it all up inside my head on a particularly hot day in June on a mostly-abandoned beach when I was seventeen years old. But maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe there are places we'll never know, things we couldn't imagine even if we had the privilege of seeing them with our own eyes. Maybe we are all spinning beneath the blue waves. Maybe we are moving against the current, and maybe we are drifting between shapeless colors and walking below the surface of it all and maybe we don't know what any of it will ever mean.

But we must try to at least remember it. Write it down in our notebooks, type it across our keyboards, imprint it in our minds. We must know that we were here and that we saw it, lived it, knew it once.

For we may not pass this way again.