The Lighthouse - 9

        The lighthouse’s beam had long faded away. I had been on the sailboat for several hours and judging by the sailboat’s speed, I was over a hundred miles out from shore.

        Suddenly I felt a shivering, a chill in my spine, similar to how I felt in the lighthouse when I was being lead by the angels. You know the feeling. You get it when you encounter something eerie that you can’t explain. Sometimes your soul senses something that your natural senses don’t perceive. For me, this shivering usually passes in a second or two, but it kept growing stronger and stronger until tears were streaming down my cheeks. I wiped my face with the back of my hand swiftly, trying to keep my eyes ahead, my other hand clenching the mast.

        The sea hadn’t changed in any noticeable way, but I knew that I had crossed into the afterlife. I trembled and tried to breathe deeply. I wish I could explain to you how the atmosphere shifted. It was almost like I woke from a dream. It was more vivid, more real here, like everything had always been rushing by me until now.

        If I had, instead, taken a boat out to sea in the same direction, I would have sailed for hours and hours and never found myself in the afterlife. The sailboat must have slipped through a doorway that my eyes hadn’t seen.

        A light began to rise over the bow in the horizon. A sunrise with a color unlike I had ever seen was blossoming in the sky. Though my eyes were wide and my heart beat strongly, the next several hours weren’t particularly eventful. The light in the sky rose higher and moved overhead.

        It was hazy, and I thought I was imagining it at first, but land became recognizable far in the distance. My heart raced. It approached slowly over the course of a half hour. I began to make out a vast beach, and beyond that a thin forest.

        The sailboat suddenly began to turn, the enchanted ropes and sails moving by themselves. It began so abruptly, I almost lost my balance. The sailboat turned until it was sailing parallel with the shoreline. It continued like that, three or four hundred yards from the shore, which I realized was about the distance it sailed from the shore back home. But then I realized that if I was going to reach that beach I would have to jump out and swim.

A thought raced through my head. Even if I found my wife, we were going to have to somehow catch up with this sailboat and board it to return to our world. But I had to put that out of my mind for now and focus on this swim. I breathed slowly and deeply for a few minutes, then plunged into the waves.

The waves pushed me toward the shore, but they also smacked into my head causing me to choke and cough constantly. Sometimes I would barely get a breath before a wave would consume me. It was a grueling swim. I was very curious what would happen if I drowned but I put that out of my head too. It was tiring. The sailboat was already far away. I didn’t feel like my muscles had anything left to give, but I was a mere hundred yards from shore. I dug deep, fighting and coughing. What I would have given for a few good breaths.

But suddenly I knew I could make it. The shore was right there. Depending on the slope of the beach, I figured my feet would touch down soon. About fifty feet out, my feet found sand. I gave it just a few more good strokes and then put my legs down again, this time my head rising confidently out of the water. I breathed heavily. I trudged through the water, half swimming half walking the remaining distance, my body faint. The waves were violent close to shore, but they couldn't stop me now. I collapsed on the beach where the waves could only lap at my legs.