Scuba

I was scuba diving once.

Not chasing fish or caves —
just practicing the rise and fall of my breath.

This basic skill, controlling buoyancy with intention alone, had been hard for me to master. So I gave myself to it completely: up and down, breath in, breath out, over what I assumed was a boring patch of sand.

Five minutes passed like that.
Floating. Breathing. Stillness.
And just as my mind began to drift — worrying that I was wasting precious underwater time on nothing but fundamentals —

the sand moved.

At first, just a shimmer. A ripple. Then the texture shifted — grain became skin, stillness became motion, and what I thought was sea floor became something else entirely.

An octopus.

I had been staring directly at her the whole time and never seen her.
She had folded herself so seamlessly into the seabed that even my focused gaze couldn’t make her out — not until she chose to rise, to shift, to become visible.

And I lit up with delight.

There she was — undulating, transforming, slipping between shapes and colors as if the ocean floor were simply an extension of her will.

And I needed my husband to see it too.

These moments are better shared — not just for joy, but for proof. We were diving with experienced enthusiasts, the kind who joke: “Sure you saw a mermaid. Got video?”
I hadn’t brought my camera. This dive was only supposed to be practice.

So I did what any determined diver would do:
I hummed his name — “Husband” — through my mouthpiece in a garbled underwater plea.

I twisted. Flapped. Waved.
My entire body pitched itself into comedic semaphore.
At one point, I even tried to ring my tank with the end of my too-short flashlight, convinced the sound might somehow cut through the water.

And all the while — I never took my eyes off her.
I was afraid that if I looked away, even for a second, I’d lose her to the camouflage again.

Still, he didn’t see me.
He was nearby, peacefully scanning the floor for something extraordinary.
And I wanted so badly to interrupt his search — to tell him, I found it.

So I shouted his name again — this time in my mind, with everything I had.

HUSBAND!

And he turned.

He saw me gesturing wildly. Saw the signal for octopus.
Saw me pointing to the living shimmer sliding across the floor like liquid glass.

And then, he saw her.

We hovered together, watching in quiet reverence.
Hand in hand, maybe — we often reached for each other in moments like this.
Her body bent into every dip, slipped over sharp edges, reshaped itself around the topography as if it were made of water and willpower alone.

We watched until our tanks warned us to return.
Twenty minutes of borrowed breath, stretched by awe.

And to think — I had only meant to practice rising and falling.
Just breath work. Just stillness.
Just sand.

But she had been there the whole time.

And she revealed herself
not when I chased her,
but when I stayed.

Sweet memories are made of this.
Of what you see
when you finally stop looking.