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Xigekey xige 3 months agoPicture this.
You are position barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is large with salt, the atmosphere decorated in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The dunes battle ahead, curling and breaking at your feet, before sliding calmly back in the depths.
But this is not only water touching you.
Since every tide… provides memory.
Exactly the same wave that brushes against your ankles tonight when swept around sides you may never know. It buried forgotten towns, cooled lava because it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that existed before people ever imagined walking upright. It carried the ashes of shoots that burnt out a lot of years ago. It has presented the bones of sailors who vanished into the night, their sounds swallowed by wind and water.
And now it variations you.
The wave takes bits of the world with it each time it retreats — cereals of sand from mountains that dropped way back when, shells that after sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, fragments of rock and glass worn easy from generations of tumbling. Where do they go? To the places we can not see. In to trenches deeper than Everest is large, in to dark canyons where gentle hasn't handled, in to currents that group the world like arteries.
The tide hides every thing it collects, burying the world's memories in a stop also large for people to break.
We inform ourselves we realize it. We graph its habits, build walls and harbors to fight it, name the hours when it'll increase and fall. But the hold doesn't care about our measurements. It hasn't belonged to us. It listens and then the moon.
That soft ghost in the air, distant and untouchable, draws at the oceans every moment of each day. The water Planet toward it, climbing to meet their invisible hand. And once the moon converts out, the water comes back. This quiet tug-of-war has shaped the world for billions of years. Also the deepest seas are connected to something beyond themselves.
The hold is changing.
It is creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are reduction into its depths, heating waters are swelling its body, and shorelines are vanishing bit by piece. Islands we once believed timeless already are removed, paid off to nothing but names on old maps.
And here is the reality many people do not want to handle: the wave won't stop for us.
We call it disaster. The hold calls it nothing at all. It just remains, since it always has, taking and offering, building and erasing. It has removed entire continents before. It can do so again.
Are you able to imagine the long run?
The sea sheets on the towns we built. Streets vanish under the waves, their asphalt damaged and damaged like previous bone. Systems fall to the search, turning in to reefs where fish move through quiet glass halls. Monuments topple, destroyed and scattered till they are indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Entire civilizations are decreased to pieces, overly enthusiastic by currents so powerful we will never swimming against them.
And when it happens, the wave will not roar. It will not rage. It will not mourn.
It will simply remember.
Since that's what the wave does. It's the planet's memory. Every life, every storm, every reduction is folded in to its depths and moved forward. The wave has viewed whole worlds rise and fall. It knows points no individual language could ever hold.
But the tide is not just a thief. It is a sculptor.
It gives living to the shore. It holds nutritional elements to estuaries and marshlands where new animals are born. It shapes the edges of the earth, smoothing sharp stones into delicate rocks, remaking shores with every breath. With no tide, the planet's heartbeat would falter. Oceans might stagnate. Coastlines might wither.
Maybe this is exactly why we are interested in it.
We go to the water's side without generally knowing why. Young ones chase the retreating waves, joking, then shriek when it rushes straight back toward them. People sit at the shoreline for hours, hypnotized by the rhythm, letting the sound of the lives get away. There's something endless in the tide's breath — something which calls to the portion people that remembers where we came from.
Because we came from the water once.
The tide moved living onto the land. It cradled the very first delicate animals that dared to crawl from the shallows. And probably that's why we feel therefore little ranking before it now — maybe not because normally it takes sets from us, but because in some serious, unspoken way, we know it gave people every thing first.
Stay there long enough, and you'll begin to notice the details. The quiet pull at your ankles as it draws away. The hiss of bubbles collapsing in the foam. The weak, nearly human sigh since it exhales onto the sand.
In the event that you listen carefully, you could hear the wave letting you know a reality:
“Nothing you know is permanent.
But nothing is truly missing, either.”
1 day, the hold will throw around the entire world like we were never here. The titles of our cities, the boundaries we struggled wars to safeguard, the monuments we developed to overcome time — all of it will be taken away, softened, and moved in to the deep.
And yet… there's a strange comfort in that.
Because the hold reminds us that people are section of anything bigger than ourselves. Something that does not need us, but holds us all the same. Everything we do, everything we build, every breath we get becomes section of its memory. The hold maintains it, even whenever we are gone.
You will never know all that it carries. Nothing of us will.
But the next time you're at the beach, stop. Have the pull at your feet. Watch the waves draw lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Remember that exactly the same tide handled lives you may never match and will touch lives extended after yours.
It does not matter in the event that you forget.
The wave won't.
The tides won't ever reveal their secrets.
But when you are quiet enough, you may sense them in your bones.