The Night the Ocean Graced the Sky
I remember that one day years ago, when we were in the car back home. It was five hours into the eight hour trip. Grey clouds covered the sky and turned the car windows into mosaics of little water prisms. The rain faded away, curtains being pulled onto another stage. A pastel, faded twilight revealed itself over the landscape. The land set in. The sky turned into the ocean surface and we were far below it. In that moment all I could think of was the immensity of it all. The sheer scale. Every cloud folding in over itself as though the waves of some gigantic body of water. Long ago this was a giant body of water—an ocean. An inconceivable aeon past when creatures of a different flesh were floating along the same path that we now rode, tiny and small. The open, rolling hills transformed in the barely audible gold of the rain-dyed sunset, shimmering like silk sheets of light under a pool.
There was no music in the car, no one was talking. Why would they? The only background was the rushing sound of wheels on wet asphalt. All around us. Cars and people travelling to and from destinations that I would never see, no matter how many lifetimes I could conceivably live. And we were also heading home. But that didn't matter. All that existed was the ocean surface up above. Waves of clouds. They made me think that at any moment we would find ourselves among a school of colourful fish. Or passing by an angry lobster clacking its claws.
The remaining drops of rain, now translucent shimmering streamers covering our windows and the exoskeletons of the cars around us, turned them into dewy ladybugs. And it felt so small. How vast was this ocean? How far below its surface were we? Did anything matter, except for the crashing, undulating, rhythmic dancing of the waves above? They were slow - deliberate. This ocean knew to wait. The seas and lakes of today that we call oceans were nothing in its eyes. Each crest of a wave took its own eternity. Cloud matter unfolding and transforming the air itself from deep blue-gray solid to bubbling white foam. The muted canary-yellow sunset threw its searchlights up into the clouds. They paid it no mind. It reflected down in wavy lines that splashed back down across the land. Plains and farmland, trees and houses, all reduced to nothing more than shifting, stage prop silhouettes waiting their turn in the spotlight.
Another wave formed and pulled itself across the sky. The ocean went on forever. The whole world was covered in it. That much was all I ever knew in that moment. Riding, floating through the scenery like the faded ghost of a much different epoch, I was lucky enough to be a guest. I had nowhere else I could or should have been but there. Suspended in animation underneath the ocean of eternity, passing through our world as the cloud cover on a Saturday evening. It lasted an eternity and faded in an instant. I felt my soul had dispersed to every corner of its expanse. I felt it anchor in myself. A trick of the light and a rare cloud formation in the atmosphere had changed the very fabric of existence for me. For just a moment.
The radio was back on. I can't remember the song.
