Prologue: The Egg

You wake up at the Somali coastline.

You wake up at the Bay of Biscay.

Each time, it's the same. 

The taste of salt on your tongue, the sting of it in your eyes. The endless deep blue. Every lift and cargo, when the ship tilted too much to one side, I prayed for a disaster. 

A moment of chaos.

The sea calls to you in ways you can't ignore, even when you know it's the death of you. Maybe because you know it's the death of you.

There's a silence that rings beneath your skin every time before thunder and lightning strikes. 

Every time the ship creaked, every time the wind howled through the rigging, I thought—this is it. This is where it ends. And I wanted it. 

I wanted that one infinitesimal moment when the smothering wet wrath of cold touches me for a moment, then envelopes me whole. 

The final release. The ocean doesn't care. It doesn't judge. It just takes.

The crew, they'd never understand. They talked about home, about wives and children waiting for them on the other side of the world.

 But for me, there was no other side. No home. Just the water. Just the endless rolling waves and the weight of the sky pressing down on me. 

They couldn't see the way the sea whispered promises in the dead of night, promises of peace, of stillness. They couldn't hear it call my name, telling me to let go.

I would stand at the bow, feeling the spray on my face, the cold biting through my clothes, and I'd imagine it. That final plunge. The water pulling me under, filling my lungs, the cold turning to numbness, and then—nothing. But not just any nothing. 

A deep, consuming nothing that erases everything. Every blunder, every goodbye, every sleepless night.

And then, one day, it happened. My wishes came true.

The ship lurched, groaned like it was dying.

And for a second, just a second, everything slowed. The tilt. The way the world shifted, like gravity was giving up. 

The horizon spun, the sky dipped, and then there it was. That cold, dark water rising up to meet me.

I didn't scream. I didn't even flinch. I just let it happen. 

The wave crashed over the deck, and I was gone.

Swallowed whole by the sea. No fight, no struggle, just surrender.

It was everything I wanted. And more terrifying than I ever wished it to be

The cold hit first, a shock that numbed my bones, my nerves. But it wasn't the cold that scared me. It was the silence.

The absolute, suffocating silence that came after the water closed over my head. No more creaking ship, no more howling wind, just the crushing weight of the ocean all around me.

For a moment, I hung there, suspended between life and death.

The surface just above me, the depths below. My body wanted to fight, to claw its way back up, but my mind… my mind was already letting go. Already sinking. Already becoming part of the nothing.

And then the darkness came. Slowly, at first, creeping in from the edges of my vision. But then faster, stronger, until it consumed everything.

And in that darkness, I felt it. The pull. The final pull. Like the sea was taking me, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.

My days are past me. But just then, I realised—I wasn't afraid of dying. I was afraid of the silence. Afraid of the nothing.

Afraid that the ocean had lied to me. That there was no peace, no stillness. Only this. Only the endless drowning.

And then there was nothing.

Everything in this plane is eggshell on off-white.

The angels here are Old Testament kind. Serving shifts. Dispensing meds in paper cups. Incomprehensible looks from their mouldy eyes. The incarnation of absurdism.

I met God across his old gilded mahogany table with his diplomas on the many walls behind him, and he asked me, "Why?"

Why did I live through the pain? What made me start it?

Didn't I realise that each of us are special unique specialness hailed from the specialness of the unique?

I look at him behind the desk, with his old-man sag and his air of someone who's seen too much but learned too little.

 He's judging me, but not in the way you'd expect. Not with wrath or disappointment, but with a kind of tired resignation. 

Like he's seen it all before and it all ends the same way. The vastness of clouds within his temple, swirling and shifting, and I think, God's got it all wrong.

We are nothing.

We are not special.

We are the same pissing, destroying, desecrating pile of matter as anyone else.

We are not snowflakes, nor trash.

We just are. We just are.

He asks me what I remember.

I remember the hole in my cheek. I remember the feeling of destroying something beautiful. When you fight, you feel nothing. 

You bash, you cheer, you get hit. The guy taps out, but you can't feel it.

I remember the blinking lights. 

The vertigo and the whiplash of flying a jet 35,000 feet in the air, the turnovers, the flashing blues and whites and oranges. 

The only power you have is how fast you'll go.  It all blurs together until you can't tell up from down, and maybe that's the point. Maybe that's the release.

I remember the towers of books piled high above me. 

Chalkboards filled with symmetrical drawings of lines upon lines on recycled paper posted with descriptions of jargon and more. The burning rejection when I set all of what I worked for on fire. 

The smell of bittersweet butane.

God taps the edge of his gilded mahogany desk with a long, pale finger.

The diplomas on the walls seem to mock the sanctity of knowledge, the plaques and frames skewed just enough to feel like a lie. 

His eyes, shadowed hollows beneath heavy lids, flicker to me and then away, like he's assessing damage, like I'm a busted-up car he's not sure is worth fixing.

From somewhere beneath the desk, he produces a bottle. 

It's small, almost delicate, and inside, colours I can't name swirl and bleed into each other. 

It's not a colour—more like the absence of everything you've ever known about light and shade. 

Like looking into a kaleidoscope made by someone who forgot to include the part where things make sense.

"This," God says, his voice the low, deliberate rasp of worn-out midnight, the kind that carries in dreams and lingers in the back of your skull, "is what you need. A new beginning. Or maybe an end. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes."

He slides the bottle across the desk, and it skitters to a stop in front of me. 

His fingers hover in the air for a moment too long before he draws back, as if afraid to touch me. 

Or maybe I'm the one who's afraid.

"You've seen too much," he continues, his words like old vinyl—crackling, echoing. "Done too much. A different world might suit you better. Something quieter. Maybe. Or maybe louder, if that's what you're after."

I don't answer. I don't need to. 

He knows I'm not after anything. There's no after to be had.

Just this. Just now.

I take the bottle. It's warm in my hand, almost alive, the colours inside shifting, diffusing, trying to pull me into them. 

I can't look away, and before I realise what I'm doing, the cap is off, and I'm drinking it down in one long, shuddering gulp.

It tastes like everything and nothing, like being awake for too many days, like a punch to the gut, like the first breath after nearly drowning. 

I don't even feel it hit my stomach. It's just gone, and I'm gone with it.

The room tilts.

The edges of the world blur, smear like wet paint on glass. 

The bureaucrat's face is the last thing I see before everything goes dark.

He's smiling, but not like you'd expect. It's not benevolent. It's not cruel, either. It's just tired. 

Like he's seen too many people drink too many bottles, and he knows where it all leads. Like it doesn't really matter in the end.

And then I'm falling. Or flying. It's hard to tell. The vertigo's back, the same as when I was in the jet, the same as when I lost control. 

My thoughts scatter like debris in a windstorm, but I can't catch them. I can't catch anything.

There's no peace in this. No resolution. 

This is the part where everything will somehow be meaningful. But it doesn't.

Maybe this new world will be different. Maybe it won't. But right now, all I can think is: It doesn't matter.

Because nothing ever does.

Why would it change?