One Last Dive

You never knew why people were so interested in aquariums. To you, it seemed as if someone had just grabbed a handful of random marine animals to see how many of them could be stuffed into a tiny glass tank. People would pay 40 dollars to watch an exotic fish that was nearly on its deathbed swim robotically back and forth for over an hour. 

He enjoyed it, though. While he observed a hammerhead shark, you observed the shades of turquoise that gently caressed his soft, round face. You silently wished that it was your palm instead. Every so often, he seemed to break his concentration to stare at you with excitement sparkling in his eyes.

“Oh, oh, did you know that the reason hammerhead sharks have those long heads is to pin down stingrays? Like, they practically headbutt them so they can eat them!”

You did know. You must have heard this fact a hundred times already. Well, to be exact, it’s been 42 times. Not like you were counting or anything. Despite how repetitive the “fun fact” became, a soft smile pulled at the corners of your lips. You could never stop smiling at him. Those big caramel-swirled eyes were irresistible. He had this bright smile that flashed the tooth-gap in the forefront of his mouth. For some reason, he seemed insecure about it. You thought it was adorable.

Each time you saw him, you noticed something new. There was this particular lock of hair on the back of his head that stubbornly stuck up. It was frizzy, which told you that he had attempted to tame it with a hairbrush just to ultimately give up and succumb to his bad hair day. A light-brown mole, which you originally thought was a birthmark, was hidden right above his collarbone. That one was hard to spot, no pun intended. You didn’t even notice it until your 31st visit.

Without any sort of warning, you’d hear a loud gasp from the empty spot in which he previously stood. After a while, this stopped concerning you. It was simply a matter of navigating the group of worn-out adults and crying kids. Then, within a span of just 30-45 seconds, you would effortlessly find him with half of his body hovering over a pool of artificial seawater. His hands grasped metal railings made to prevent children from waddling carelessly in, though the railings didn’t do much of anything to prevent a full-grown man from leaping in. He would lean in as close as he could, looking as if he was seconds away from rolling into the water, to see the stingrays fluidly sliding through the pool below him. The stingrays were his absolute favorite. A part of you wished that you would have had the courage to record his voice rambling about lesser-known stingray facts just so that you could fall asleep to his voice. 

It was too late now. Personally, the stingrays didn’t amuse you too much. The shadows in the water were what caught your attention. Your shadows stood closer together than you truly were, blending into a dark blue mass as if you were leaning against him. Maybe, just maybe, you actually could this time.

Tirelessly attempting to battle your gnawing anxiety, you hesitantly inch closer to him.  Standing next to him, you place one hand on the railing while the other hand yearns for something else to hold onto. In order to test the waters and hide your apprehension, you let your hand lightly brush against his before allowing your palm to come into contact with his hand. Your skin feels electric.  His touch alone causes your body to tingle, and your hands begin to feel cloudy as your heart batters against your chest. For the brief moment that it lasts, you cling to that sensation. You bathe in it, knowing very well that it will only last a few nanoseconds. The warmth embraces you and you confidently lean into it. You think that he might have turned to look at you, but you didn’t even have the time to catch a glimpse of his caramel eyes. 

You feel whole. It was a fleeting emotion that promptly shattered like fiberglass, abandoning you to sit in the broken shards alone once more. 

The sensation of freezing water biting at your skin pulls you back into the present, punishing you for what you have done. You only had a few seconds to roll out of the tub before it froze over, but you’ve gotten used to the process.

You’ve visited that very aquarium 42 times already. You hate it. But, God be damned if you don’t love him.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The sound of water trickling from your soaked clothes and onto the cold tile seems to be the only noise within the house now. The only thing in sight was the bathtub beside you, merely due to the fact that the liquid inside of it illuminated the area. The glowing cyan wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate the entire room. The power must be off. There were no sounds of buzzing electricity present, there was no warmth, and there was surely no light.

You are alone.

The only two things that were present were you and this bathtub.

Honestly, you really aren’t sure what to call it. Even though you often find yourself referring to it as just “the tub,” the porcelain itself wasn’t what worked the magic. It was the liquid within it that really mattered. The bathtub was full of a concoction of chemicals. It took 16 years of sleepless nights, microwaveable meals, and lukewarm coffee to proportion the perfect amount of ingredients to make it. Despite the chemical burns that your past mistakes had left on your body, you had no regrets whatsoever.  When fully submerged, the mixture gave the user the ability to travel through time. 

Well, that was a simplification. Time is erratic by nature. In science fiction, a time machine can take us anywhere we want to go at any time, but in reality, things are much more complex. 

For starters, it’s important to remind ourselves that the future has not happened yet while in the present. Secondly, you can’t visit “the” past, only your past. You were never there to experience the building of the Great Pyramids. You cannot revisit something you haven’t visited in the first place.

With this in mind, time travel seems so much more boring. However, there are some interesting bits to the whole thing. One definitive fact is that there is only one you in this present moment. As a result, if you traveled in time, a duplicate of you would exist. One version of yourself would be the one to travel initially, while the other version of yourself would be from the time you are visiting. To eliminate the possibility of the past being altered due to the presence of the second you, one of you must go.

And, after it all, you promised you would never do it again.

The pain of being slaughtered is still fresh in your mind. You tried to make it quick for yourself, but with the tools you had available, it wasn’t as clean as you hoped it would be. The last moments of your life were painful, lonely, and confusing. You recall the memories of killing yourself while simultaneously being killed. After that, you were too afraid to revisit any other memory. Killing yourself once was certainly enough trauma for a lifetime.

It’s not like you can even get tired of the aquarium, anyway. Seeing him every day, just like you were able to 16 years ago, is worth anything. It’s worth having no electricity. It’s worth having no gas. It’s worth having no food. You don’t need any of those things if you have him. He was all that you truly needed.

It seemed like an eternity before the ice started to melt. Time, as stated previously, is finicky. If you do something unexpectedly momentous, it will attempt to freeze you in place to stop you. But, despite how blue your skin may turn, you will always go back to that moment. It was all that mattered to you. He is all that matters to you. You will lose everything if it means you can see him again.

The broken shards of ice that floated on the surface of the water signaled you to dip back in. Your clothes were still soaked. They hugged your body, forcing the outline of your ribs to make themselves visible to your invisible audience. It was a mystery whether the freezing water or the severe malnourishment was the culprit for your trembling body. It didn’t even matter. You slipped back into the tub, practically flopping into the freezing water, before you felt that warmth again.

43 times.

You’re cold again.

44 times.

You’re getting colder.

45 times.

You covered his entry fee. 15 dollars didn’t seem like a lot to you before you saw your empty bank account afterwards. Unfortunately, despite how poor you were, gift-giving was your love language. Money has no meaning to you now, though. You no longer experienced the awkward smile and head-anxiety you had when you had rashly promised to pay his fee after your third visit. It was then that you began to realize that you never wanted to leave the aquarium. Not for the marine life, but for him.

As always, you begin to go through the motions. He watched the hammerhead shark. After observing his micromovements (and finding out that his lips twitch ever-so-slightly when he’s excited), your eyes switch to the tank as well. A shark shook its body back and forth, performing its ritualistic dance, before you caught something out of the corner of your eye. It has been something abnormal as of late. It was something new.

With its fins flapping like an aquatic condor, it effortlessly moved through the water. The glowing cyan dots that were splattered across its back looked strikingly similar to the liquid you had just recently submerged in. You only recognized it as the blue-spotted stingray because you were well aware that it was his favorite animal, and for that reason alone. But, as you recall his repetitive “fun fact,” you realize that this beautiful animal was the primary prey for the shark floating just a few feet away.

His favorite animal, one so dear to his soft heart, was about to be killed by the hammerhead he was admiring, and all you could do was watch it happen.

But it didn’t. Instead, it flew by the oblivious shark to rest in the sand in front of you. The cyan speckles along its back were hypnotizing. Due to the contrastive moss green that covered most of its body, its color stood out and gave the impression that it was glowing.

Suddenly, he turns towards you. It startled you out of focus, flustering you as he tried to make eye contact. With bright eyes, he recites:

“Oh, oh, did you know that the reason hammerhead sharks have those long heads is to pin down stingrays? Like, they practically headbutt them so they can eat them!”

You blinked. Did he miss the stingray that flew right by that shark? Did he not see it right in front of you?

You briefly hold your breath, weighing your options and their consequences, before mentioning the stingray. It was important enough for you to risk going back into the present and restarting this all. It wasn’t as if you hadn't done it 45 times already.

“Did you notice that stingray,” you begin, “...the… the, uh, the one in the tank…?”

Your words were quiet. They appeared timid and uneasy, as though you hadn't spoken in decades. Your body begins to tighten to prepare for the bitter cold to engulf you. It never came.

Instead, he gave you a confused expression.

“Stingrays? There’s no stingrays in there.”  He turned to look at the tank again, his eyes scouring the sand and water for the aforementioned stingray, before looking back towards you. “They’d get eaten, remember? I just said that.”

The cold bites at your fingers. It warns you to tread carefully.

You feign a smile and nod. “Oh, yeah, I must’ve been mistaken… my bad.”

There was a pause. The show continued. 

He watched the shark again, gasped again, and disappeared into the crowd (again). You chose to watch the stingray with the valuable time you would have originally spent anxiously searching for him. It floated idly. You felt as if it was watching you. With a pivot on your heel, you begin to sink into the crowd. Maybe it was a fraction of someone’s conversation, or maybe it was just something your brain pieced together to misinterpret, but you swore you heard, “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

It was nothing. You refuse to believe it was something. This little aquarium visit has happened dozens of times already. There was no way it could be anything but something in your head.

But, still, you couldn’t help but feel a twitch of hesitance in your stomach before going towards the stingray pool. Standing beside him, you mirror his actions and lean over the railing to properly see the stingrays. Relief silently flooded you as you noticed the lack of spotted stingrays. With your mind at ease, you return to your regularly scheduled program. 

His eyes were on the stingray pool. Your eyes were on him. 

Someone else’s eyes were on you.

The spotted stingray. 

It floated just below where you and him stood, seemingly staring up at you.

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” it repeated.

Nobody else heard.

“You have to leave.”

You recognized the voice.

“You have to accept it.”

It was his. You were sure of it.

Standing beside you, you take notice that his mouth doesn’t move and his body doesn’t flinch, still cursed in the cycle of the same movements you’ve been replaying for the last 7 days. 

Your eyes flicker downwards to ensure that the spotted stingray is still there. It felt as if you made eye contact with it, causing your body to freeze like a deer in headlights as the world cracked around you. The walls of your reality shatter like ice, their shards stabbing into the very core of your being. 

This wasn’t right. It’s not supposed to be like this. Maybe you were dying. Maybe you were already dead.

With a racing mind, it takes a second for you to regulate your breathing. You look to see if the spotted stingray is still there- just in case- for it to be quietly floating in the same place.

“Who are…?” You trail off as your eyes flick towards the man beside you. It wasn’t the best impression to be heard just talking to yourself like a madman. Though, you were beginning to think you had already gotten to that point anyway.

“You know who I am.” As it spoke, the cyan spots seemed to grow brighter, illuminating the water around it. “...You know who I was.”

You turn in silence as you watch the man you love and know so well try to slyly dip his hands into the stingray pool while grinning mischievously. As soon as his fingers grazed the water, the stingray shot through the pool and towards his hand. Your hand instinctively reaches for his shirt collar to pull him back, but the stingray had already disappeared by the time he fell to the ground. The cyan that had dotted the stingray corrupted his fingers. His bulging blue veins gradually became luminescent. It was almost as if his skin was translucent.

He sat up.

You couldn’t find the strength to look him in the eyes. His skin was that familiar lifeless pale that you knew all too well, and his veins were that familiar cyan. It almost looked as if he had gone hypothermic again.

“Hey… it’s time to let go, okay?” His voice, despite his ghostly appearance, was still full of his natural warmth. “You can’t keep doing this, we both know that.”

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

“...Please listen to me.”

You were supposed to be with him forever.

“You’re hurting me.”

Those words instantly caught your attention, causing your eyes to snap back into place. How did he still manage to have those soft caramel eyes, even now?

“You can never do something again for the first time. You can relive the same experience, but you can’t relive those feelings, y’know? It’s never gonna be the same, but that isn’t a bad thing.”

He reaches out to caress your face, though he seems to hesitate and pull back.

“Make new memories without me.”

The only thing you could manage to say was, "One last time?" in a wavering tone.

A soft laugh escapes him. He seemed more flattered than anything.

“One last time,” he repeats with a comforting smile. His hand reaches out to your face again. Without any hesitation, you feel his palm on your cheek.

It’s warm.

Then it got cold.

For the 46th time, you watched him observe the shark.

For the 46th time, you listened to his cute fun facts.

For the 46th time, you smelled the gross artificial seawater.

For the 46th time, you touched the chilly metal fence.

But, for the first time, you tasted his ice cold lips.