Perspective and Revelation

It took thirty-six hours of air travel, six hours to drive to Knysna from Cape Town, one hour from there to Mossel Bay and a ten minute drive on the boat. I needed to see the bottom of the world so I could see life from its liquid depths. I am standing motionless, hypnotized by the smooth dark water. The delicate skin separating our two worlds is being massaged and stretched by the energy that governs within. I cannot see through it, I must go inside it.
The sun is beating on the thick black layer of neoprene containing me. My skin must be melting and fusing to it. I fasten the mask around my face and the smell of salt, fish and blood is replaced by stale rubber. My breathing slows down and my heart rate speeds up. I am fully reincarnated as a synthetic being of the water.
The sensation of the skin under my feet penetrating the stinging cold skin of the liquid beast stays with me as I fully lower and submerge into the alien world. I am now reduced to nothing but a heartbeat contained in a wet suit. I suck in contained air, filling the abyss that is now my insides, so slowly that I cannot imagine exhaling. My heart pumps slow and hard, the inertia projecting waves of my energy into the unknown. I wonder if it can feel me in its territory.
It was something inside me that saw it first, before my eyeballs darted to the approaching mass on my right. I don’t need to see it to know the force and power that is steadily closing in, the pumps of my heart colliding with it harder and harder tell me. Then there is nothing, there is no cage, no gear, no breathing, I am nothing but liquid being moved by the pressure around me. At this moment, I only exist to perceive a creature three times long as I am tall, that knows nothing of earth, air and evil. It moves with grace and sheer supremacy, slowly pulling the water that surrounds me with it. It leaves me, fading into the darkness ahead, until I see it approaching head on as if it wants to swim through me to prove my insignificance.
I blink and I am facing it. I think it stops for a moment, or maybe it’s my heart, and then it is turning, headed somewhere behind me. At that moment I really see it, I can see my whole life in its big black eye that is fixated on mine. At that moment I am the shark, looking at an alien, saying ‘I see you, you are one with me’. I do not remember life before the moment I saw the truth through the shark’s eyes.