This Secret Buried Beneath the Tides Will Outlive Us

Photograph this.

 

You're position barefoot at the edge of the ocean. The air is heavy with sodium, the air decorated in bruised purples and firelight from the desperate sun. The waves competition ahead, curling and breaking at the feet, before sliding calmly back to the depths.

 

But this isn't only water touching you.

 

Because every tide… carries memory.

 

Exactly the same wave that brushes against your ankles today once taken around worlds you may never know. It buried neglected towns, cooled lava since it spilled from newborn volcanoes, and drowned woods that existed before humans actually imagined walking upright. It moved the ashes of fires that burnt out one thousand years ago. It's used the bones of sailors who faded in to the night time, their voices swallowed by breeze and water.

 

And now it details you.

 

The hold takes pieces of the entire world with it everytime it retreats — grains of mud from hills that fell long ago, covers that once sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, parts of rock and glass worn clean from centuries of tumbling. Wherever do they go? To the areas we cannot see. In to trenches greater than Everest is tall, in to black canyons wherever light never touched, in to currents that circle the world like arteries.

 

The tide covers everything it gathers, burying the world's thoughts in a stop too substantial for us to break.

 

We tell ourselves we understand it. We information its patterns, construct walls and harbors to battle it, title the hours when it'll increase and fall. Nevertheless the hold does not value our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It concentrates simply to the moon.

 

That pale ghost in the sky, remote and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every moment of every day. The water Planet toward it, growing to meet their invisible hand. And when the moon turns out, the water falls back. That silent tug-of-war has shaped the planet for billions of years. Also the deepest seas are tethered to something beyond themselves.

 

Yet the hold is changing.

 

It's creeping further inland now. Glaciers are melting into their depths, heating seas are swelling its body, and shorelines are vanishing bit by piece. Islands we once believed timeless already are removed, paid down to only names on old maps.

 

And listed here is the reality most people don't want to handle: the wave will not stop for us.

 

We contact it disaster. The hold calls it nothing at all. It just continues, because it always has, getting and providing, sketching and erasing. It's removed entire continents before. It is going to do so again.

 

Would you envision the future?

 

The ocean sheets on the towns we built. Highways vanish underneath the dunes, their asphalt damaged and broken like old bone. Towers collapse in to the surf, turning in to reefs wherever fish drift through quiet glass halls. Monuments crumble, shattered and scattered until they're indistinguishable from the rocks of the seabed. Entire civilizations are paid down to pieces, carried away by currents so solid we will never swimming against them.

 

And when it occurs, the hold will not roar. It will not rage. It won't mourn.

 

It will simply remember.

 

Since that's what the tide does. It's the planet's memory. Every life, every surprise, every reduction is flattened in to their depths and moved forward. The wave has observed whole sides increase and fall. It understands things no individual language can actually hold.

 

Nevertheless the wave is not really a thief. It is just a sculptor.

 

It produces life to the shore. It provides nutritional elements to estuaries and marshlands where new animals are born. It designs the ends of the earth, removing sharp stones into delicate rocks, remaking beaches with every breath. With no hold, the planet's pulse would falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines could wither.

 

Maybe that's why we're interested in it.

 

We go to the water's edge without generally understanding why. Children pursuit the retreating dunes, joking, then shriek when it rushes back toward them. People sit at the shoreline all day, hypnotized by the beat, allowing the sound of the lives slip away. There is something endless in the tide's breath — something that calls to the part people that remembers where we got from.

 

Since we originated from the water once.

 

The tide carried life onto the land. It cradled the very first fragile animals that dared to get from the shallows. And possibly this is exactly why we feel so small ranking before it now — maybe not because it will take sets from us, but because in a few deep, unspoken way, we all know it gave us everything first.

 

Stay there good enough, and you'll start to notice the details. The quiet whip at your ankles since it pulls away. The hiss of bubbles crumbling in the foam. The weak, nearly individual sigh since it exhales onto the sand.

 

In the event that you listen carefully, you may hear the tide suggesting a reality:

 

“Nothing you know is permanent.

But nothing is truly lost, either.”

 

One day, the hold will throw around the world as if we were never here. The names of our cities, the edges we fought wars to safeguard, the monuments we built to overcome time — everything is going to be swept out, softened, and carried to the deep.

 

And yet… there's a strange comfort in that.

 

Since the wave tells people that we are element of something larger than ourselves. Something which doesn't need us, but keeps us all the same. Every thing we do, every thing we construct, every air we take becomes element of its memory. The wave maintains it, also once we are gone.

 

You'll never know all that it carries. None of us will.

 

But next time you're at the seaside, stop. Have the move at your feet. Watch the dunes pull lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Remember that the same tide handled lives you'll never meet and can touch lives long after yours.

 

It does not subject in the event that you forget.

The tide won't.

 

The tides won't reveal their secrets.

But if you're calm enough, you may feel them in your bones.