keyword "soul" title "god, interrupted" in misc. flash fiction

God not as a Norse-Christian hairy thunderer nor hippie-dippy New Age cosmic muffin but God, God as the ocean, God as the sea. God, vast bottomless ancient insanely powerful, powerful in a way that changes shorelines on whim, provided God has ten thousand years after that whim but also, in the moment despite its power, in a given moment just kind of there in background, as the waves lapping at the same patch of sand you saw it lapping against as a child and you will see it lapping against when you’re old. God, never changing in your lifetime because you get about as much breath as a mayfly but on a scale of eons able to change anything. God ocean, ancient and powerful and vast but not sensate in any way we comprehend, too long-lived, too many trillions of waves made, too many trillion more to make. God as something like that.

Someone takes a paper cup, scoops water from the sea, into a cup from a fast food joint and it’s such a small amount compared to the briny blue but ultimately, it’s the same stuff same water as the ocean, a little in one place separate from the rest for a while, small and differently-shaped but still the same as the sea. Inside that cup, that’s you, what you’d call your soul, self-contained and unable to shape continents but made of the exact same stuff, microform in paper cup, that’s you.

Maybe you get lucky and live to eighty and you start to think that you are the cup or that your water and the cup are something inseparably the same. Maybe you have come to think that the words on the side are your name, maybe you think that you are “burger king”, not water pulled out from sea. Someday, though, a long time later, your water will be cast back into sea and you will remember, you were always the same as the ocean. You were always made of water, you were a tiny part of that water, taken away for a little while and you realize that your name was not “Burger King” after all. You realize the real that you were always ocean waters and you will
blend back in, indistinguishable again, you will be the same thing as God again in time.

God, God as the ocean, God as the deep blue ancient ocean. The soul, your soul as a fragment of that ocean, separate and small for a little while, to learn about what it is to be separate and small
then you rejoin that endless ancient sea.

This is the God I want to believe in, this is the soul as I want it to be, that is the God I hope there is, this is the soul I’m looking for, God as the ocean god as the sea, my soul as a little cup of me, this is how I’d want it to be. I hope.