In the Dark Blue

This was my favorite time of the day - closing.

All of the families with their too-wild kids, all the bored teenagers on school trips, all the old couples with their careful steps shuffled and funneled out of the main door until there was no one left in the Open Sea room but me.

Just me, with that enormous wall of water, the ocean in miniature held back by two feet of acrylic (not glass).

Me, one million gallons of water, and all the denizens therein - giant tuna, pelagic rays, and green sea turtles, to name but a few - swimming in their lazy circles, gliding, unhurried, peaceful and serene.

I check all of the doors to ensure they’re locked, turn off the lights, turn off my phone until it is just me and the blue, and I sit and gaze.

I never know what will bubble up when it’s just me alone in the aquarium, the AC unit ticking over above me, the silence even more profound given the hubbub of the crowd that just left, exiting through the gift shop, the lobby, and off to wherever it is they’ll go next. Home, I imagine, whatever that looks like for them.

For me, home is a one-bedroom, 600-square-foot apartment two blocks away - easily walkable, especially on a clear night, which I think it is. The last time I looked out a window was hours ago. I’ve been in the subtle dark since then, the dappled light from the tanks illuminating my footsteps as I move from one to the next, greeting visitors, offering to tell them about the sharks, the sardines, the kelp, or our newest visitor, a Japanese spider-crab.

When a whale dies, the body sinks to the ocean floor, and the remains (called a whalefall), huge, nutrient-rich - attract hungry scavengers like this one, sustaining an active ecosystem for years and years. Sometimes decades.

I sit, gaze, and contemplate. A retired teacher, I still enjoy explaining the ocean to visitors, especially children, the wonder apparent on their open faces - the magic song of the deep blue calling to them the way it does to me.

Even so, it is even better when they are all gone, and I can be alone.

Tonight, I remember my grandfather.

When my mom was little, he worked at the Papst Blue Ribbon brewery in Newark, NJ, famous for the 60-foot high beer bottle adorning the top. It sat there, perched, for over 70 years overlooking the Parkway before it was eventually dismantled and taken down to make room for houses and a shopping mall. Bet that mall is closed now, too. Wonder what it left behind. Wonder who is picking it over.

My grandfather worked the graveyard shift at Papst, so he’d get home from work just as my mom and her three sisters were waking up and starting their day - a family of six in a 1,000-square-foot ranch - can’t imagine the squabbling that must have taken place there. I bet my grandfather would have welcomed sitting in an aquarium like this one - the muffled quiet, the slow circles of the fish, the room to contemplate and let one's thoughts expand, unencumbered by the noise and needs of others. He didn’t have an aquarium to escape to, but he did drink for years, and my mom, to this day, says she believes in miracles because he eventually quit.

She used to describe watching her mother bandage his hands, which were cracked and split from working long hours in the moisture, her coffee beside them, letting off wisps of steam in the early morning light.

I think about his hands and rub my own together, feeling more life and warmth return to them, and then, fingers interlaced, I gaze at the dark blue some more.

Time unspools and expands for me when I sit like this, water without a container, flowing the path of least resistance back to the ocean. All water seeks the ocean, eventually, doesn’t it? Knows that union with the greatest version of itself before taking on another form, as cloud, as rain, as river, as ice and snow, and back again.

I’ll head home soon, walk home the two blocks and make some dinner and fall asleep on the couch, book on my chest, but for now, this is enough.

I take a deep breath and let it out, feeling something release in my chest did not realize I was holding in.

This is enough.