“RELIEF OCEAN” is a poetic rumination on the spiritual/mystical possibilities that swim alongside affective states experienced during depression and sickness, but also in psychedelia, art, queer love and friendship, and in grief. This essay begins with a reflection on the writer’s artistic collaboration with his late ex-boyfriend Billy, who died in December 2024 after a multiyear battle with cancer. Drawing upon Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (1986) and Jackie Wang’s Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect, the essay loops threads through the writer’s more recent filmic collaborations with intimate interlocutors and communities in India and Guyana, sites of his ancestral lineage. How might the oceanic open us toward new conceptions of collective and personal resistance on a vast scale?