below-the-sea

We keep sending colonies up into space,_ Akilah says, __nd we don__ even know what__ at the bottom of the sea.___eah, we do,_ I counter. __ish and stuff.__kilah laughs. __e__e barely explored the sea. There are places where the water is so deep that it has never seen light._ She sighs. __ would like to go to those places. I would like to sink down and down and down and see what__ hidden at the bottom.__he sea is a dangerous place because it makes you believe in forever. I stare back at the shoreline, where heavy boulders clutter the shore, a remembrance of the attacks during the Secessionary War. For all the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, more are dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea. I tread water, turning slowly, so the island__ behind me and all I can see is the blue-green waters. The sea goes on forever and ever. We are tiny, almost invisible specks. It could swallow us up. We are less than the bright stars of the night sky, compared to the vastness of the sea.And it is this place, as one tiny, barely visible speck bobbing in the water, where Akilah feels safe.Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.