xigekey
516 posts
Jul 29, 2025
11:10 PM
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Photograph this.
You are position barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is heavy with salt, the atmosphere painted in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The waves race forward, curling and breaking at the feet, before dropping quietly back to the depths.
But that is not only water touching you.
Because every tide… holds memory.
The same wave that brushes against your legs today after swept over sides you'll never know. It hidden neglected cities, cooled lava as it spilled from newborn volcanoes, and drowned woods that existed before people ever dreamed of strolling upright. It carried the ashes of shoots that burned out one thousand years ago. It has used the bones of sailors who faded into the night, their sounds swallowed by breeze and water.
And now it details you.
The hold takes items of the planet with it every time it retreats — grains of sand from mountains that fell way back when, shells that after sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, parts of rock and glass used smooth from ages of tumbling. Where do they're going? To the places we cannot see. In to trenches greater than Everest is large, into black canyons where gentle hasn't handled, into currents that range the planet like arteries.
The hold covers everything it gathers, burying the world's thoughts in a silence too large for people to break.
We tell ourselves we understand it. We information its patterns, construct surfaces and harbors to fight it, name the hours when it will increase and fall. But the hold does not value our measurements. It hasn't belonged to us. It listens and then the moon.
That soft cat in the sky, distant and untouchable, brings at the oceans every time of every day. The water stretches toward it, increasing to meet up their invisible hand. And once the moon turns away, the water comes back. That quiet tug-of-war has formed the planet for billions of years. Even the deepest seas are connected to something beyond themselves.
The wave is changing.
It's creeping further inland now. Glaciers are melting in to its depths, heating seas are swelling its human anatomy, and shorelines are vanishing bit by piece. Islands we after believed timeless happen to be gone, decreased to only titles on previous maps.
And listed here is the reality many people don't need to handle: the tide will not end for us.
We contact it disaster. The hold calls it nothing at all. It really continues, as it always has, getting and offering, building and erasing. It's deleted entire continents before. It can do therefore again.
Would you imagine the future?
The water rolls over the towns we built. Streets vanish underneath the waves, their asphalt broken and broken like previous bone. Systems fall in to the surf, turning in to reefs where fish drift through quiet glass halls. Monuments fall, broken and scattered until they are indistinguishable from the rocks of the seabed. Whole civilizations are decreased to parts, carried away by currents therefore strong we could never move against them.
And when it occurs, the hold won't roar. It will not rage. It will not mourn.
It will just remember.
Because that is what the tide does. It's the planet's memory. Every life, every hurricane, every loss is folded in to their depths and moved forward. The wave has observed whole worlds rise and fall. It understands points no individual language could actually hold.
However the wave is not really a thief. It is really a sculptor.
It offers living to the shore. It provides vitamins to estuaries and marshlands where new creatures are born. It patterns the ends of our planet, removing sharp rocks into delicate rocks, remaking beaches with every breath. Without the tide, the planet's pulse might Planet. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines would wither.
Maybe that's why we are drawn to it.
We visit the water's side without generally knowing why. Young ones pursuit the retreating dunes, laughing, then shriek when it rushes right back toward them. Adults sit at the shoreline for hours, hypnotized by the beat, allowing the noise of the lives slide away. There's anything timeless in the tide's air — something that calls to the part folks that remembers where we came from.
Since we originated from the water once.
The wave carried living onto the land. It cradled the very first fragile animals that dared to get from the shallows. And perhaps that's why we experience so little position before it now — perhaps not since normally it takes sets from us, but because in a few serious, unspoken way, we all know it gave us every thing first.
Stand there long enough, and you'll begin to notice the details. The quiet whip at your legs because it brings away. The hiss of bubbles crumbling in the foam. The weak, very nearly individual sigh since it exhales onto the sand.
If you listen tightly, you might hear the tide suggesting a truth:
“Nothing you know is permanent.
But nothing is truly missing, either.”
1 day, the hold will roll over the entire world like we were never here. The names of our towns, the borders we struggled conflicts to guard, the monuments we developed to overcome time — the whole thing is going to be swept out, melted, and carried into the deep.
And yet… there's an odd ease in that.
Because the wave reminds people that individuals are part of something larger than ourselves. Something which doesn't need people, but keeps all of us the same. Every thing we do, every thing we build, every breath we take becomes section of their memory. The hold keeps it, actually once we are gone.
You will never know all so it carries. None folks will.
But next time you're at the beach, stop. Have the pull at your feet. View the waves pull lines in the sand, then remove them without hesitation. Understand that the same hold touched lives you'll never meet and may feel lives long following yours.
It doesn't subject in the event that you forget.
The wave won't.
The tides won't ever tell us their secrets.
But if you're calm enough, you may feel them in your bones.
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