VIII. 80% More to fear in this world
Thalassophobia: Fear of the Ocean.
Thalassophobia: Fear of the Ocean.
The ocean does not want you.
It swallows light at 600 feet and never spits it back,
dining on dying things that drift in silence,
soft-rotting into something between prayer and surrender.
Beneath the surface, pressure builds like a wrath held too long,
1,100 times the weight of what your ribs can bear.
A place where the lungs of ships collapse inward,
where even echoes drown before they find their way back.
They say we mapped the heavens before we dared map the deep,
that we launched ourselves skyward with more hope,
than we ever carried into the black beneath us.
We dipped our toes into the abyss, then fled.
Something down there made man stop looking.
Something made them turn their gaze to stars instead.
And still, beneath the waves, the dark waits,
unchanged, unbothered, unbeaten.
We’ve brushed 90% of Mars with robotic fingertips,
run algorithms through the dust of ancient rivers,
traced time in scars on distant rock.
But over 80% of our own ocean remains untouched,
unseen, unwelcoming.
A blind spot that lives beneath our feet.
Perhaps we fear the things we think we know,
but we run from what refuses to be known at all.
The Challenger Deep calls.
but not by name,
it does not need to.
It is patient.
It is starving.
It is 36,200 feet of never-should-have-been,
a wound on the earth’s body that never scars over.
They say 829,000 people die every year,
from unsafe water.
I think the ocean keeps a tally,
counts them in stillness, one by one.
A collector of breathless things,
an archivist of what cannot float.
It is easy to fear the void above us,
to tremble at the endless hush of stars.
But space is just a question unanswered.
The ocean is a mouth that never stops asking.
