The Feel Good Way

We’re in the zodiac, bouncing over the water. Someone points.

Fins. Dolphin fins, rising and falling in the distance.

My heart is already gone.

We slip into the water gently, quietly -you don’t want to spook them. The Red Sea here is ridiculous. Crystal clear, like looking through glass, the bottom visible as if there’s nothing between you and it at all.

We go back every day. Several times a day, actually. And slowly, over those days, you start to understand them. You learn the rules.

Don’t chase. Don’t touch.

That second one is harder than it sounds, because they come so close. Close enough that you have to tuck your hands against your body to avoid accidentally brushing them. Which is both wonderful and torturous.

In the beginning, it’s enough just to be in the water with them. To watch a large school move slowly beneath you, unhurried, completely unbothered by your presence. They’re so calming. Even when they’re playing, spinning, mating, shooting past at insane speed -zero to thirty kilometers per hour in two seconds- even then, they radiate something like peace.

Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s the weightlessness. Maybe it’s because underwater, the world goes muffled and all you can hear is their clicking and whistling, this ancient private language.

Whatever it is, it works.

After a few days, I figure out how to swim beside them. Calmly, no sudden moves, matching their pace. Only then do they stay with you. When they’re done, they dive deep, and they know you can’t follow.

So I learn their rhythm. Dive down, surface while turning. Dive, surface, turn. I practice floating. Alone. Still. Semi-meditative, like my friend advised. She also told me to leave my camera behind. Hard advice to take when you’re a photographer. But this isn’t work. This is holiday. And some moments, maybe, aren’t meant to be captured — just lived.

And they come to me.

He comes to me.

He circles around me. I turn with him. We swim slow circles together, like we’ve agreed on something. Then he swims away -not down, just away- as casually as if he just remembered somewhere else to be.

I’ve got the trick now. I’m certain of it.

I slip back in, and there he is again.

Is it the same one? I don’t know. I’m too focused on his face to check for the scar on his right flank. All I see is his eye, and all I’m doing is trying not to lose it.

He’s playing. Spinning so fast I have to turn in place just to keep up.

Glorious.

Then something cracks open. The emotions come loose -hard, intense, completely unannounced. When he finally swims off I haul myself back into the zodiac and sit there, dripping, needing a moment. I decide this was my last swim of the day.

I go back in within ten minutes.

Just floating this time. Watching. A large group beneath me, drifting. Here and there, one surfaces for air.

I do nothing. Just drift with them.

And then one comes straight at me.

Without thinking, I reach my hand forward. Like I’m calling him. Like some instinct older than sense just took over.

We lock eyes.

He keeps coming. Full speed. Collision course. For one very real second, I wonder if I should move.

He’s not slowing down.

And then -at the very last moment- he turns. Just barely. And circles me again.

We swim in circles together. Again.

It’s too much. It really is too much.

These animals carry something. A reputation for healing, for being light beings, for holding some kind of energy that humans can feel but can’t explain. I believe every word of it.

I haven’t cried this often in years. From happiness. From something that felt like ecstasy. For reasons I still can’t fully put into words, except that I was touched by something that felt genuinely heavenly.

A heavenly being that lives underwater.

And I am, completely and totally, undone.

It takes days to shake this feeling.

Honestly? I’m not sure I want to.