The Ocean

She stepped through the carpet on to the Earth below. The feeling of it beneath her feet was incredible, like smelling a fresh baked apple pie for the first time. She took another step down, and another, until she was in the dirt itself. There, she moved through the domain of worms as if she belonged with them. She traveled quickly, slowing only to twist around or dive under the roots anchoring majestic oaks and elms to the world. She went further and further, passing the burrowed homes of animals. Sometimes she paused briefly and looked in on them, watched them sleep, or eat, or hide from predators above. But she never disturbed them, and always continued on her travels.

Eventually, the ground began to change. It was no longer tightly packed, but looser, and it became coarser as well. Still she continued moving forwards. Soon the earth around her changed again, becoming damper as she went, and she knew what would come next. She inhaled deeply, held it in, and burst forth from the ground into the ocean.

Briefly she paused in her journey and floated, in awe of the sights before her. The light reached down from the sun above and hit the surface of the water, and the waves overhead acted as a prism, and the light parted into rays around her. And those rays hit the fish as they swam about, and their scales reflected it in even more beautiful ways. But the fish seemed to not notice the brilliant display about them. They simply went on with their lives. And she wished she could too, but there was something more important to do. So she continued on, occasionally rocked by the wake of a large school, or tickled by the seaweed below.

As she went out into deeper and deeper water, she eventually lost site of the submerged land beneath her, but it was not a problem. She knew where she had to go. And she swam on and on, under storms and over sharks, beneath boats and above dolphins, until her lungs began to twitch. She knew she had to pause, to catch her breath, but she wanted to keep going. Finally, she could take it no more and surfaced. She let what felt like ancient air out of her lungs, and drew in new. It was different from the air she was used to, tinged with the salt of the ocean around her.

Now, she looked about. It was night, and there was not a cloud in the sky. She looked at the burning balls of light above, at the galaxies flying about the space around her world. She longed to explore them as well, but it was not her place. She knew that, just as she knew that she was almost where she was supposed to go. She only had to do one thing now: dive.

She went deeper and deeper, past the point where the dim light of the stars refracted to nothingness. The water here was cold, and she shivered but never slowed. Deeper, deeper. Now she was almost at the bottom, and she saw it. Lights glimmered ahead, beckoning her. This was it, she was almost there. She landed with her feet on the ocean floor, and stared at the structures before her. There were arches of coral at angles that seemed impossible, towers that looked like they were carved of seashells that rose up beyond her vision, around it all was a wall of sandstone with towering gates of pearl spaced evenly across it as far as she could see, and it was all illuminated by a light that came from nowhere, yet was everywhere. At the gates stood lines of people like her, people who had been called. She ran to them, eagerly awaiting what she would find on the other side of the walls. They moved quickly, and as she drew nearer she realized there were more people in line behind her. No one spoke, as they were all holding their breath.

Finally, she was standing before the gate herself, and there was a man looking at her. He called out her name. “Laura,” he said, and his voice seemed so powerful that she wondered how she had not heard it before. “Do not be afraid. You need not worry about breath here. Enter the kingdom of your Father, and be joyful.” She only then realized that her lungs did not burn from holding her breath. In fact, she felt no need to breathe at all.

She entered through the gate, and walked through this strange new place. There were streets paved out with precious metals, where people bustled about in a calm, unconcerned way, like a child. She walked about too, taking in the sights of parks filled with children, and of statues that seemed to ignore physics with pieces sitting in mid air. She began to feel sorrow that she had no one here to share it with, though it was a passing feeling, as no sooner had she felt it her mother and father stepped from the crowd and walked towards her.

They embraced for the first time in many years, and all cried tears of joy. Her parents told her how eagerly they had waited to be reunited with her, that they knew she would be missing her wife and daughter, and that she needn’t worry.

“Just like you, they’ll come home eventually.”