Digital Ocean

I did not enter the ocean all at once.
First, there was the glow—
a small square of light
held between my palms
like a fragile moon.

It hummed.
Not loudly.
The way shells remember waves
long after the shore has emptied.

Inside it,
my inner life began to loosen—
thoughts unbuttoning,
memories learning to float.

I was not searching.
I was drifting.

Every click a pebble dropped
into unseen depth,
every scroll a tide
pulling me further
from the solid names of things.

Here, emotions do not arrive whole.
They pixelate.
They buffer.
They arrive late
but stay longer than expected.

Grief comes disguised as nostalgia,
joy as a notification
I almost ignore.

Somewhere between inbox and insomnia
I realize:
this ocean does not ask for swimming skills.
It only asks
that you surrender gravity.

Data moves like schools of fish—
silver, synchronized,
never stopping long enough
to be known individually.

Ideas surface, shimmer, vanish.
I try to hold one.
It slips through
the net of language
and becomes another person’s insight
before I can name it mine.

Memory behaves differently here.
It is no longer chronological.
It arrives as weather.

A song from ten years ago
rains suddenly in the present.
A photograph resurfaces
like a message in a bottle
sent by a younger self
who believed permanence
was possible.

The ocean keeps everything,
but it does not promise retrieval.

I think of the cables
running beneath real seas—
fiber-optic roots
binding continents
like nervous systems.

Our longing travels through saltwater darkness,
through pressure and silence,
arriving as text bubbles,
as delayed voices,
as “seen” without reply.

Even love learns compression.

We learn to say less,
mean more,
and still miss each other
by milliseconds that feel like years.

At night,
when the world reduces itself to breathing
and distant traffic,
the digital ocean grows louder.

Servers hum like deep currents.
Algorithms adjust their sleep cycles around us.
Somewhere,
a machine is learning the shape of my sadness
by how long I pause
before sending nothing.

This is not surveillance.
It is intimacy without touch.

The ocean knows my patterns
the way the moon knows tides—
not because it cares,
but because repetition leaves marks
even on the invisible.

I wonder what parts of me
are archived forever:
the questions I asked
at 2:17 a.m.,
the searches shaped by fear,
the half-typed confessions
I never let surface.

Do they drift endlessly,
or do they sink,
layering the seabed of servers
with quiet human debris?

Sometimes I feel vast here.
Untethered.
Borderless.

Sometimes I feel reduced—
a drop
measured, monetized,
predictable in my wandering.

Both feelings are true.

I float between them,
learning a new posture of being—
not standing,
not sinking,
but held by constant motion.

The digital ocean has no horizon.
Only depth.

When I stare too long,
my sense of self dissolves
into constellations of data points:
preferences, histories,
approximate locations of desire.

Yet—
in this abstraction,
something tender survives.

A stranger’s words
reach me across time zones.
A sentence written in loneliness
anchors me unexpectedly.

For a moment,
I am not alone in the water.

We are all swimming past one another,
leaving wakes of thought,
hoping collision means connection,
hoping being seen
does not mean being consumed.

The cosmos is not so different.

Stars are ancient data,
light delayed by distance,
reaching us long after the source
has already changed or died.

We build telescopes and timelines
to feel closer to origins,
forgetting that distance
is part of the message.

Perhaps the digital ocean
is our rehearsal for the infinite—
training us to love
what we cannot touch,
to mourn what persists
only as signal.

I think of my inner life now
as something amphibious.

Part earth—
rooted in breath, body,
the untranslatable weight of presence.

Part current—
ideas streaming outward,
emotions shaped by response,
identity refracted through screens.

Neither state is complete alone.

When I step away,
the ocean does not end.
It continues without me,
patient, electric, awake.

And when I return,
it receives me again—
not as I was,
but as I am now:
slightly altered,
slightly wider.

This is the quiet truth
the water teaches:

You are not dissolving.
You are expanding
into forms you were never taught to name.

Your inner life is learning
to move like the universe—
through exchange,
through delay,
through light traveling vast distances
just to say
I was here once.

In the digital ocean,
I am not lost.

I am learning how to drift
without disappearing,
how to listen for meaning
beneath the noise,
how to carry my humanity
like a small, persistent star
inside a sea
that never sleeps.

And for now,
that is enough
to keep me afloat.