The Journey Ends Here

The greatest and most disturbing thing 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’re really just a blip in time. The universe has no limits, no boundaries, and nothing 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. Once accepted, this knowledge changes 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 when everything we thought we knew becomes lies we tell ourselves for comfort, like a child under a blanket hiding from monsters believed to be waiting in the darkness, never questioning how a thin piece of soft material can protect 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, or why anyone is afraid of death. It is not 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 goes on. People will still wake up and go to work. They will 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 with a severe weather alert flashing on my phone. The sky grew unnaturally dark, tricking 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 wondered what horrible thing they’d done in the 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 the darkened sky, threatening a torrential downpour at any second. The weather alert said the rain wasn’t expected to start until around nine o’clock, but I grew nervous the closer I got to Pensacola. I decided to make the trip for my medicine despite both my internal messaging system and my fiancé telling me I probably shouldn’t take the risk. The dogs get really anxious 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 anyway. 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, which was pretty normal for Pensacola Bay. The thing came out of nowhere. I call it a thing because its appearance seemed to defy the laws of what could even exist in this world. It was tall and wide. So tall and wide, in fact, that it seemed to touch both the core of the earth and the stars above, connecting 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 it was a shade like black—yet no shade of black in the universe 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 swept over us, and everything around me went black.

My car was hauled 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 this creature of a wave; there was only the darkness 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. I opened my eyes and felt no sting of salt or minerals. Honestly, it didn’t feel like I was in water at all. It felt like floating helplessly in a vacuum.

Dark silhouettes of hundreds of people surrounded me. 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, like plastic dolls in a gelatin mix for a corporate Christmas party no one wanted to attend. Below me, I saw the silhouettes of our cars, especially the celestite-colored 2020 Toyota Corolla I had been so proud to buy 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. It was unearthly, and its mere appearance refused to align with any reality I knew. The creature was an octopus. I cannot say it was the largest octopus I had ever seen, because I’d never seen one outside the flat confines of a television screen. Still, I didn’t have to know the average size of an octopus to know that this one was far larger than biologically possible.

Its color assaulted my senses. It was a flat, saturated pink that didn’t exist in our world. It was an impossible color that lacked any shadows or blemishes of normal earthly flesh. The color appeared as if it had been violently painted into the dark water by the heavy stroke of a child’s crayon. It drifted effortlessly like a sheet of silk through the shallow bay, which offered no resistance in return.

Thick, fleshy tentacles uncurled and stretched into the open water around it as it glided past our suspended bodies. The suckers on its tentacles were the size of dinner plates, licked clean by a greedy tongue. Its massive, smooth dome of a head sounded like a sunken ship, and its eyes split my soul in half as they met my gaze. The octopus’s eyes were cold, horizontal slits that were pale and wide.

I could have sworn it looked directly at me, indifferent and uncaring, but I was wrong. It stared right through me and the cloud of drowning souls, completely blind to our fear and agony. As it moved past me, I felt like an ant against an adult human’s skin.

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 water’s surface 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, though 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 my sight, making the world around me look like it had a snowy border, 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 felt the warm, humid air against the wetness of my skin. My head broke the surface with a gasp of salty oxygen, slowly relieving the demon child’s need to come prematurely.

My long, wet tendrils of hair whipped out of my face as I thrust my head up and looked around at the scene before me. Everyone I had seen underwater was now at the surface, too, screaming in terror at everything they had 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 engulfed us moments before.

Something was wrong with the familiar place I had traveled to so many times. Pensacola’s brilliant skyline had been extinguished, and the lights along the I-110 bridge were dead. The massive concrete structure was like skeletal remains left behind by a forgotten civilization. I looked around me. A suffocating, unnatural silence had fallen over the world. Only the raw, echoing screams of survivors thrashing in the water broke it. I could hear the sickening, rhythmic friction of the god-sized octopus scraping through the bridge’s pillars.

One thing was clear: rescue was not coming. The world we knew had simply stopped caring that we were there.