It was a skiff without a motor. In waters this deep, it was just a well-shaped raft.

And the storm that struck was terrible indeed, waves rising like walls. His hands gripped the sides of his vessel just to stick to it as it tumbled over mountains and into valleys, a gut-wrenching ride caught by intermittent flashes of lightning.

But the struggle was what he needed, wasn’t it? Fire lanced up his limbs, a muscle torn, a tendon ruptured. The pain kept him aware, aware of the warmth of his blood against the chill of the ocean’s spray. And awareness brought joy all on its own, a rush of pleasure that persisted only through a complete and utter commitment to surviving the next minute, the next second, the next moment. He opened his mouth and enjoyed torrential rain; he scrubbed his eyes, tears forming from the salt in the spindrift.

And then, he found the world flipped on its head, a haunting cry the last thing he heard before he struck the waters.

Instinct drove him to kick upwards as the bubbles burst out from his nose. His hands pulled for the skiff he had never let go of, but only fragments remained in his grasp. He swivelled around, but the undertow, the churning of currents, continued to pull. Fire entered his lungs now, and adrenaline gave him another shot of alacrity, the exhilaration now of simply fighting for another few seconds of existence, for without a boat, there was no surviving the ocean depths. A futile struggle.

Always, a struggle.

And within the gloomy dark, lit up by shafts of light cast from the crackling of lightning thousands of meters up in the sky, Belo laid his eyes upon a whale for the first time of his life.

The world was wide.

If only he had seen more of it.

…

A thought bubbled up alongside his last breath.

[i]Was that all?[/i]