The Journey Ends Here

The greatest and most disturbing thing that I have ever learned about humanity is the extent of our mortality: that in all the vastness of space, from the smallest molecule to the stars and planets, we really are just a blip in time. The universe has no limits, no boundaries, nor does it have anything to tell it to stop. It took chance after chance, rolling the dice, and we are the product of the one time that the universe got it right. This knowledge, once accepted, has a way of changing people. It crushes egos, shakes the soul into oblivion, and pushes the human psyche into madness so uncontrollable that a person would rather die than live every day consumed by an insatiable fear. Because how does one cope with the realization that every mundane encounter, every success, every loss, and every failure is ultimately meaningless? Humanity cannot fathom it, and that is why we ask questions like “Why do bad things happen to good people,” or “Why me?”

 Sometimes it is not that simple, if those questions are even simple at all. There are moments in normal, mundane existence where everything we thought we knew becomes lies we tell ourselves for comfort, like a child under a blanket hiding from the monsters believed to be waiting in the darkness; never questioning how a thin piece of soft material is adequate protection against a ravenous belief. This was my ravenous belief: that I meant anything in this world at all. It was that my life was this magnificent story of which I was the main character, and that nothing bad would happen to me because I have plot armor and some unspoken protection stated among pages and pages of prewritten text.

Maybe that is why I have been so afraid of death. Maybe that is why anyone is afraid of death. Not necessarily because the hereafter is unknown, but because death and tragedy come for us when we least expect them; during plans, unfinished goals, and unachieved dreams. But life will go on. People will still wake up, go to work, and read our obituaries in the paper while sipping their coffee. Yet, the universe has a way of violently stripping us of our comfortable delusions. For me, the unraveling began not with a grand cosmic awakening, but with the severe weather alert shining on my phone, and a sky that grew so unnaturally dark that it tricked both nature and technology into believing it was night, hours before sunset.

It was the end of July, when the sun was at its angriest, and everyone below questioned what horrible thing they did in their past to deserve such torment on a hot Florida day. Pensacola was busy as it usually was around six o’clock. The city lights were already illuminating under the darkened sky, threatening a torrential downpour at any second. The weather alert had said that the rain was not expected to start until around nine o’clock, but I had grown nervous the closer I got to Pensacola. I had decided to make the trip for my medicine despite both my internal messaging system and my fiancé telling me that I probably should not take the risk. The dogs had bad anxiety during storms, and the roads were dangerous to drive on.

But I needed my medicine and knew I would not make the drive the next day, so I got in my car and started driving. Three hours. I could make it there and back in three hours. The I-110 bridge opened before me as my car joined the others across the three-mile gap between land. The water below was dark and impenetrable to human eyes. The thing came out of nowhere. I call it a thing because the appearance of it seemed to defy the laws of what was even possible to exist in this world. It was tall and wide. So tall and wide, in fact, that it seemed as though it touched both the core of the earth and the stars above, connecting both Escambia County and Santa Rosa County better than the Bay Bridge did.

It roared in silence like the desperate straining to hear a whisper in a dream. I could not describe the color, even if my life depended on it, except to say that it was a shade like black—yet there is no shade of black in the universe that compares to the emptiness I felt looking into the eyes of impending doom. The entity was both matte and glassy, if that is even possible, and it moved like a tsunami, except the water of the Bay remained unbothered by its presence. It cast no shadow over us as it approached the bridge. I only had a single moment to realize what was about to happen before this entity crashed over the bridge like water and everything around me went black.

My car swept up into the churning stillness, and I felt it slam against the side of the bridge before being forced over the edge. I never saw a moment of open air or the world outside of this creature of a wave. There was only the darkness of the inside of the bay beneath the steel span of highway. It was almost as if the thing had moved into the water with us because the bay did not seem normal for Florida waters, even during this part of the year when rain created a sandy chaos beneath the surface of the deep. I opened my eyes and felt no sting of salt or minerals. Honestly, it did not feel as though I was in water at all. What it felt like was how I imagine it would feel to float helplessly around in the vacuum of space.

All around me were the dark silhouettes of hundreds of people. It looked like a piece of artwork depicting the moment of a rapture when God would call His people home. I could not see their faces or the colors of their clothing. I could only see them all suspended in the middle of the water as if we were plastic dolls placed inside a gelatin mix for a corporate Christmas party no one wanted to attend. Below me, I saw the silhouettes of our cars, specifically the celestite-colored 2020 Toyota Corolla I had been so proud to purchase myself with the credit score I’d worked so hard to improve. Its side was completely smashed in from the impact against the thick steel and concrete of the world we had left behind.

As my gaze lifted, a disturbing sight lay across my vision: a creature so large and vibrant in color that I could not grasp how it existed. Not because it was explicitly unearthly, but because the mere appearance of it refused to align with any reality that I knew. The creature was an octopus. I cannot say that this was the largest octopus I had ever seen because I haven’t ever seen one outside of the flat confines of a television screen, but even I could not deny that the creature was far larger than what is biologically possible.

The color was an assault on the senses: a flat, saturated, impossible pink, lacking any of the shadows or blemishes of earthly flesh that a normal environment would bring. It appeared as if it had been violently painted into the dark water by the heavy stroke of a child’s crayon, yet it pulsed with a heavy but terrifying vitality. When it moved, it was like a cloud of heavy silk underwater, drifting effortlessly with undulating grace. Despite its immense size, its mass rippled through the water of the shallow bay, yet the depth offered no resistance to its weight.

Thick, fleshy coils uncurled from its center, dragging long ribbons of pale, circular suckers past our suspended bodies. Each sucker was about the size of a dinner plate, completely smooth and terrifyingly clean. Above the twisting mass of arms sat a massive, smooth dome of a head. But it was the eyes that split my soul to match their cold, horizontal slits. They were pale and wide, staring right through the cloud of drowning souls, completely blind to our agony. And as it passed by me, my body looking like an ant against a human adult’s skin, I could have sworn it looked directly at me, indifferent and uncaring.

A sudden fear struck me, hitting me in my core, and I knew I could not breathe. The weight of no oxygen compressed against my rib cage like a vicious kick to the gut, except there was no air that could come out. My entire chest felt like I was incubating a fiery demonic child getting ready to birth itself through my throat and out my mouth. Before the full length of the tentacles passed me, I looked up to the only light I could still see.

The surface of the water shimmered above like a lighthouse guiding a lost ship to shore. I reached up with my arms and kicked with my legs, feeling myself propel toward Heaven, although it was not as fast as I would have liked. My body felt as if it were full of lead, weighing me down like gravity pulling the universe into existence.  A cold sensation prickled at the edges of sight, making the world around me appear to have a snowy border around it like a winter-themed profile picture on social media. The pressure behind my eyes grew worse the closer I got toward the doorway to the other side of the bay.

Then I felt myself breathing hard and fast. My heart raced as confusion tore through my body, spirit, and soul. It was almost out of a dream: the paralyzing fear of my body spasming into tight knots, trying to bring in the oxygen it desperately needed. The oxygen it thought it was getting as the phantom breaths got louder and louder. My hand was the first part of my body to reach the surface. I could feel the warm, humid air reacting against the wetness of my skin. My head broke the surface with a gasp of salty oxygen slowing relieving the demon child’s need to come prematurely.

My long, wet tendrils of hair whipped out of my face with the thrust of my head as I looked around at the scene before me. Everyone that I had seen underwater was now at the surface, too, screaming in terror from everything that they had also just witnessed. I looked up at the still-dark sky, the hue of manufactured night. Surprisingly, the Bay Bridge stood tall and untouched by the giant wave of chaos that had ensued on us just moments before.

However, something was wrong with the familiar place I had traveled to so many times. The brilliant skyline of Pensacola had been completely extinguished, and the lights along the I-110 bridge were dead, leaving the massive concrete structure looking like the skeletal remains of a forgotten civilization. A suffocating, unnatural silence had fallen over the macrocosm, punctuated only by the raw, echoing screams of survivors thrashing in the dark, and the sickening, rhythmic friction of the god-sized octopus scraping its massive bulk through the foundational pillars of the bridge. The world we knew had simply ceased to care that we were there. Through all of this, one thing was clear: rescue was not coming.