I Saw God Beneath the Ocean. It Was Not Meant to Be Seen.

I saw God, and God saw me. Or maybe… I didn’t see anything at all.

Lately, I’ve started to doubt even the simplest things. I don’t know if I’m alive. I don’t know if these words are truly mine, or if something else is thinking through me and calling it my voice. Even this cave I’m sitting in—the cold walls, the silence pressing in from all sides—might not exist beyond my perception of it.

A man’s existence, I’ve realized, can collapse into something incredibly small. A fleeting thought. Something that appears, lingers for a moment, and then disappears without leaving proof it was ever there.

The unsettling part is… it didn’t feel any more real back home. That life already felt like a dream—distant, looping, incomplete. The same words kept returning to me, again and again, echoing inside my head until they stopped sounding like thoughts and started feeling like something else entirely… something that was slowly tearing through me from the inside.

“Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook,
Or snare his tongue with a line which you lower?
Can you put a reed through his nose,
Or pierce his jaw with a hook?”

I don’t remember these words, and I know for certain I had never read them before—yet they came to me in a dream and never left.

It was the twenty-third of… I can’t remember the month. The date is the only thing that stayed with me, as if everything else was deliberately taken.

My daughter woke me from a deep, heavy sleep. I remember how tired I was. I hadn’t been home in months—I work on an oil rig, far from land, far from anything that feels human. I spend most of my life away, but this time… this was the longest I had ever been gone.
She was happy when she saw me. I remember that clearly. And I was happy too. I hadn’t seen her in so long that I had started to forget the small details of her face—the softness of it, the way she looked at me. Seeing her again felt like remembering something I wasn’t supposed to forget.

“Aisha…” I whispered.

She looked at me with those wide, shining eyes, as if something she had been wishing for had finally come true. She started talking immediately—about school, about her friends, about her eighth birthday. She told me how she thought no one would show up, how she had waited and waited… and then they did. Her friends came, they brought gifts, and she smiled in a way that made it sound like the happiest day of her life.

That’s when I remembered the gift in my bag.

I had already sent her a photo a few days earlier—of the ocean on a calm day, the water so still and blue it almost didn’t look real. Like a piece of sky had fallen and settled into the earth.

I reached for my backpack and pulled out a small box, neatly wrapped in pink paper with white polka dots. She didn’t hesitate. She tore through it as quickly as she could, the paper crumpling in her hands. Inside was a small red plastic case.

I watched her, waiting.

She opened it slowly this time, and when she did, she lifted the pearl out into her palm. It caught the light in a way that didn’t feel natural.

“I found this when I was on the boat,” I told her.

Even as I said it, something about that memory felt wrong. I don’t remember how I found it. Out there, in the middle of nowhere, where there should have been nothing… I somehow came back with a pearl.

The thought slipped away as quickly as it came.

She jumped into my arms, holding onto me tightly. She was laughing, telling me she loved me, her voice full of a kind of happiness I hadn’t heard in a long time. And then she pulled away just as suddenly, clutching the pearl, and ran down the stairs to show her mother.
We ate pizza that night—something I hadn’t had in a long time. We always ordered from the same place. Aisha and Myra loved it. The taste hadn’t changed—still terrible, at least to me—but I ate it anyway, just to see them happy. I can’t even remember when I started hating pizza so much. It feels like one of those small things that slipped away without me noticing.

Later, when the fatigue finally wore off, we went out to the supermarket to buy groceries. The place was the same as always—bright lights, familiar aisles, the quiet hum of refrigeration units. As soon as we walked in, Aisha ran ahead to grab her cereal, disappearing around the corner without a second thought. Myra stayed back for a moment and asked me to pick up anything I wanted.

I wandered for a while, not really looking for anything in particular. Then, at some point, I just stopped.

In the corner of the aisle, there was a bucket filled with water. It must have been left there by one of the workers. There was no movement around it, no one passing by—but the surface of the water… it rippled.

I stood there, staring at it, unable to look away. It felt wrong. Not dramatic, not violent—just wrong in a way I couldn’t explain. The kind of wrong that pulls at your attention without telling you why.

“Behold, the hope of a man is false;
he is laid low even at the sight of him.
No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.
Who then is he who can stand before me?”

I don’t remember these words that began to surface in my mind. They didn’t feel like thoughts I had formed, and the voice that carried them… it wasn’t mine.

Then came something else—words I couldn’t understand, spoken in a voice that felt impossibly old. It was the same voice, I’m certain of it—the one that had called out to me on the boat, when I stood there with that pearl in my hand.

Then I heard something again. Not spoken words, but pressure inside the skull. A wet, dragging sound behind the eyes—syllables folding over each other, breaking before they formed. A rhythm like distant drums under the ocean. Dreams that feel like memories, not imagination. Sounds that seem almost like language—but break apart when I focus.
“In his house at R’lyeh, dead waits dreaming.”

A small hand slipped into mine, and suddenly I coughed—hard, like I’d come up from deep water, lungs burning, desperate for air that wouldn’t come fast enough. I gasped, each breath sharp and uneven, as if I’d been drowning just moments before.

I looked down at my daughter. She was staring up at me, worried.

“I’m fine,” I told her, forcing a small smile. “Just… still tired, I guess. Haven’t rested properly yet.”

Even as I said it, it felt like an excuse I didn’t fully believe..

We went home after shopping. It took longer than it should have, but eventually we had dinner and put on a movie Myra suggested. It was late, and Aisha fell asleep on the couch halfway through, her head resting against the cushion, the screen still flickering across her face. I carried her upstairs and tucked her into bed.

When I came back down, I laid my head in Myra’s lap. I had forgotten how soft her skin felt—how familiar it was, how calming. There was a quiet in that moment I hadn’t felt in a long time, something steady and real.

And yet… it all felt distant, like something I was remembering rather than living.

I don’t know why. Maybe I had been gone too long. Or maybe the sea had taken more from me than just time—maybe it had washed parts of me away, piece by piece, until even moments like this felt like they belonged to someone else.

Myra leaned closer, her face turned slightly away from mine at first. I could feel her breath—warm, steady. Her long black hair fell around me like a curtain, brushing softly against my skin. Then she closed the distance and kissed me.

I had missed this. I had missed her—her warmth, her presence, the quiet way she made everything feel whole again. In that moment, I found myself wishing it would last, that it wouldn’t slip away like everything else had begun to. I didn’t want this to become another memory that felt like a dream I couldn’t hold onto.

I reached up, holding her gently as I kissed her back. Our tongues met. The world seemed to narrow down to just us—her touch, her breath, the rhythm of something familiar returning. I sat up, and she followed, neither of us wanting to break away.

Slowly, I eased her back onto the couch, my hands tracing what I had almost forgotten and slowly unbuttoned her shirt. Beneath it, she wore a red bra, rising and falling with her breath, which had grown warmer, heavier. For a moment, I just looked at her—taking in the familiarity of her, the reality of her presence—before my hands moved again, gently unclasping it.

My hands moved over her breasts, feeling the warmth and softness of her body, familiar and yet almost forgotten. She let out a slow breath as I held her. She unbuttoned my pants.
There was nothing hesitant in the way we touched—only the need to close the distance that time had carved between us. Her skin against mine felt real in a way nothing else had since I came back, grounding me, anchoring me.

I entered her, and she let out a soft, breathless moan that seemed to pull me fully into the moment. For the first time since I had come back, nothing felt distant. Nothing felt borrowed or fading.

This was real.

The warmth, the closeness, the way she held onto me—it grounded me in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. I was here. Myra was here.

Her moans fell into rhythm with mine, each movement drawing us closer, more certain, as if we were trying to hold onto something that refused to stay still.

I felt the pleasure, and with it came something else—something deeper, something that didn’t belong to me, yet insisted on being felt.

My eyes rolled back as if the ecstasy was pulling me somewhere else, somewhere far beneath myself. The warmth of the moment twisted, stretched, and suddenly I was no longer there—not in the room, not with her.

I was beneath a vast, ancient ocean. Dark. Endless. Watching from somewhere that wasn’t quite a body.
When I surfaced, I wasn’t alone.
There were thousands—countless forms rising with me. They had no faces, no shape I could fully understand, and yet… they screamed. Not like creatures, not like anything natural—but with the sound of something once human, something that remembered what it had lost.
And all of us were gasping for air.

The water began to rise.

I tried to scream, but no sound came out. It was as if the body I was in didn’t belong to me—like I was trapped inside something that refused to respond. Panic clawed at me, but even that felt distant, muted.

I looked down, trying to understand what was happening.
And that’s when I realized—it wasn’t the water rising.

It was us.

A massive hand, impossibly large, was lifting us upward from the depths.

“On earth there is nothing like him,
Which is made without fear.
He beholds every high thing;
He is king over all the children of pride.”

I heard the words again, ringing inside my ears—not loud, not distant, but impossibly close, as if they were being spoken from within me. And this time, the voice carried something I couldn’t ignore.

It was familiar.

It sounded like my mother.

For a moment, everything else faded—the ocean, the hand, the countless screaming forms—and I was pulled into that voice, into a memory I hadn’t thought about in years. I didn’t understand why it was all coming to me, in pieces and over and over again, something I couldn’t even comprehend.

I was never a religious man. I never believed in any of it—not truly. But she did. She always did.

She used to tell me stories when I was a child, her voice calm, steady, filled with a kind of certainty I never questioned back then. Stories of creation, of judgment, of things beyond human understanding. Sometimes she would sit beside me and recite verses from the Bible, her hand resting on my head as if she was trying to protect me from something I couldn’t see.

There was one passage she returned to more than the others.

The one about the creature in the deep.

“Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook…? Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?”

I never understood why she lingered on that part. To me, it was just another strange story—another distant thing that had nothing to do with the world I lived in.

But now… the words were different.

They didn’t sound like a lesson anymore.

They sounded like a warning I had forgotten.

“No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up…”

The voice wasn’t just remembering—it was reminding.

And as those words echoed through me, standing there in that impossible depth, I began to understand why they had stayed buried in my mind all these years.

Those words, her voice, the memory of her had begun to warp, as if something had reached into them and stirred them out of shape. They didn’t break; they twisted. Meaning slipped. Familiarity rotted.

And then I saw it.

Not in front of me, not in the water—but inside the act of seeing itself.

Eyes.

Not a pair. Not many. Not anything that could be counted. They were there, nested in the dark behind thought, opening in places where perception should have ended. They were not looking at me—they were looking through me, past the idea of me, as if I were only a thin surface stretched over something far more important.

My memories didn’t belong to me anymore.

I felt them being touched, folded, rearranged—my mother’s voice bending into something older, her words unraveling and reforming into shapes that carried no language, only intention. Every fragment I tried to hold onto slipped, like trying to remember a dream while something actively rewrote it.

Understanding became impossible.
And yet something else took its place.

A knowing that had no form.
A presence that did not exist in the darkness, but as the condition that allowed darkness to be.

Then the pain came.
Not sharp. Not sudden. But absolute.

It began in my chest and expanded outward, as if something vast had pressed against me from the inside, testing the limits of what a body could contain. My lungs collapsed in on themselves; not emptied, but denied. Air fled me in a single, violent exhale, and nothing returned.

I tried to breathe.

There was no mechanism left for it.

No rhythm. No instinct. No body that remembered how.

Only the certainty that something immeasurable had reached into the small, fragile space I called myself and found it insufficient.

My hand rose, grasping at nothing—reaching for something, anything that still held meaning, something that felt like mine. But there was nothing to hold onto. No anchor. No certainty.

My eyes rolled back, the darkness swallowing everything.
And I woke up.

I was in my bed, drenched in sweat, my breath coming back in ragged, desperate pulls as if I had just been dragged out from deep water.

I was home.

Myra lay beside me, asleep, her breathing slow and undisturbed, as if nothing had happened at all.

Days passed, and I felt… normal. No dreams. No voices. Nothing that followed me into sleep.

Days turned into weeks, and slowly, quietly, my leave began to run out.
It was my last day at home before I had to return to work.

Myra came downstairs and wrapped her arms around me without a word. There was something different in the way she held me. Tighter, almost trembling. When she finally pulled back, she told me she was pregnant.

For a moment, I just stared at her, unable to rocess it. The words didn’t settle right away. But then the confusion gave way to something else—something lighter. Surprise. And then, slowly, unmistakably… happiness.

I was happy.

Aisha was still asleep upstairs. The thought of leaving again pressed against me, heavier now. I wanted to see her face, to memorize it properly this time—to make sure it wouldn’t fade, wouldn’t slip away like everything else had started to.

Myra took my hand and led me upstairs, into the bathroom. She filled the bathtub with warm, soapy water, steam beginning to gather along the mirrors and walls. We stepped in together, the heat settling into my skin, loosening something inside me I hadn’t realized was still tense.

She moved closer, slowly, until she was sitting on my lap, her back resting against my chest. Her skin was warm and damp beneath my hands, her breathing steady as she leaned into me. I wrapped my arms around her without thinking, holding her there, feeling the quiet weight of her, the life she carried, the moment itself.

There was a softness to it—something unspoken, something fragile.

For once, nothing felt distant.

“You’re going to leave us again,” Myra said.

The words caught me off guard. “What?”

“You will leave us alone.” Her hands moved slowly over her stomach, almost absentmindedly. “We wanted you to stay… but you always choose the sea.”

“I don’t—”

She cut me off.

Before I could understand what was happening, my face was forced beneath the water.
The warmth vanished instantly.

The water turned cold—unnaturally cold—as if it didn’t belong in that room. I thrashed, trying to pull away, but her grip tightened. Her hands closed around my neck while her weight pinned me down. My lungs burned, my body fighting for air that wasn’t there.
I tried to look up at her—but I couldn’t see her face.

Or rather… I couldn’t recognize it.

It was there, and yet it wasn’t. Something about it felt distant, wrong—like I was looking at a version of her that had been stretched thin across something else. Something that wasn’t alive in any way I understood.

The water pressed in around me.

It felt deeper than it should have been. Endless. Colder than the ocean itself.

I was drowning.
And the worst part was—I had felt this before.

That same helplessness. That same certainty that I didn’t belong to my own body anymore. Like I had slipped into something else’s dream, something that was never meant for me.
The light above me fractured, then disappeared.

Darkness closed in.
And then—I woke up.

I was on a beach, coughing, dragging air back into my lungs as if I had been pulled from the depths. Around me lay the remains of a shipwreck—splintered wood, twisted metal, fragments of something that had no business being there.

I didn’t think. I didn’t question it.

I just moved.

I gathered whatever I could carry and made my way toward the cave, the wind cutting through me as if it wanted to peel me apart. The sand beneath my feet was black—darker than it should have been, swallowing what little light there was.

And the night…
The night was colder than anything I had ever known.

Colder than the deepest part of the ocean.

I waited for days, watching the horizon, expecting something, anything, to appear. No one came.

So now I write this, hoping it reaches someone. Hoping that, somewhere, these words survive even if I don’t. That the world knows I existed. That Arthur Wrenford was alive.
I don’t know who will find this, or if anyone ever will. But if there is any mercy left in whatever governs this place, let these thoughts find their way into someone’s mind. Let them reach Myra. Let her know how I died.

When I could no longer wait, I walked toward the ocean. Each step felt heavier than the last, my body worn down, my strength thinning with every breath. The waves moved slowly, almost patiently, as if they had been expecting me.

I stepped into the water.

As it rose around me, that old dread returned, the same suffocating darkness, the same feeling of being pulled into something vast and unknowable, the same feeling of hands around my neck. I was in the ocean again. I was drowning again.

The voice came back.

The eyes followed.

And as I sank deeper, something in me shifted. A thought, quiet at first, then undeniable. What if none of it had been real? Not the life I remembered, not the home, not Myra, not Aisha. What if they were only fragments, placed inside me… something to make me believe I was human?

I don’t know why I thought that.

But something I saw down there made it feel true.

As I descended, I saw it. An impossibly vast shape, suspended in the darkness, so large that my mind refused to hold it together. Around me, countless others drifted downward, just like I was, drawn toward it without resistance.

I wondered if this, too, was a dream. If I would wake up again, somewhere else, somewhere familiar. I found myself wishing for only two endings—that I would either sink completely… or open my eyes beside Myra.

So I closed them, holding onto one memory I had promised myself I would never forget.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember her face.

But when I reached for it—for the one memory I had sworn I would never lose— there was nothing there.

I couldn’t remember her face.