xigekey
517 posts
Jul 29, 2025
11:36 PM
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Photograph this.
You are ranking barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is major with salt, the sky painted in bruised purples and firelight from the desperate sun. The waves race ahead, styling and breaking at your feet, before slipping silently back into the depths.
But that is not just water pressing you.
Since every tide… bears memory.
Exactly the same wave that brushes against your ankles today after taken around worlds you may never know. It buried forgotten cities, cooled lava since it spilled from newborn volcanoes, and drowned woods that existed before people actually imagined strolling upright. It carried the ashes of fires that burned out a lot of decades ago. It's presented the bones of sailors who vanished into the night, their comments swallowed by breeze and water.
And today it touches you.
The tide takes pieces of the world with it each time it retreats — grains of mud from hills that fell way back when, covers that when sheltered lives smaller than a fingernail, pieces of rock and glass used clean from generations of tumbling. Wherever do each goes? To the places we cannot see. In to trenches deeper than Everest is large, into black canyons wherever mild hasn't touched, in to currents that group the planet like arteries.
The wave hides everything it gathers, burying the world's thoughts in a silence also vast for people to break.
We inform ourselves we realize it. We chart their designs, construct walls and harbors to struggle it, name the hours when it'll rise and fall. However the tide does not care about our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It listens and then the moon.
That pale ghost in the air, remote and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every time of every day. The water Planet toward it, increasing to meet up their hidden hand. And when the moon converts away, the water comes back. That quiet tug-of-war has designed the world for billions of years. Actually the deepest seas are connected to anything beyond themselves.
Yet the hold is changing.
It is creeping further inland now. Glaciers are melting in to its depths, warming waters are swelling their body, and shorelines are vanishing item by piece. Islands we after believed endless are actually gone, paid down to only titles on old maps.
And listed here is the truth most people don't want to handle: the wave will not stop for us.
We contact it disaster. The tide calls it nothing at all. It just continues, as it always has, taking and giving, sketching and erasing. It's erased whole continents before. It will do so again.
Can you imagine the long run?
The sea rolls within the towns we built. Streets vanish underneath the waves, their asphalt damaged and damaged like previous bone. Systems collapse into the search, turning into reefs wherever fish move through silent glass halls. Monuments fall, destroyed and scattered till they're indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Whole civilizations are reduced to fragments, carried away by currents therefore solid we could never swimming against them.
And when it happens, the tide will not roar. It will not rage. It will not mourn.
It only will remember.
Because that's what the wave does. It is the planet's memory. Every living, every storm, every loss is folded into their depths and moved forward. The tide has viewed whole worlds increase and fall. It understands things no individual language can actually hold.
Nevertheless the wave is not only a thief. It is really a sculptor.
It delivers life to the shore. It holds vitamins to estuaries and marshlands where new animals are born. It shapes the ends of the earth, smoothing sharp rocks in to soft rocks, remaking shores with every breath. Minus the hold, the planet's heartbeat might falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines would wither.
Maybe that's why we're interested in it.
We head to the water's edge without always understanding why. Kids chase the retreating dunes, joking, then shriek when it rushes right back toward them. People remain at the shoreline for hours, hypnotized by the beat, making the sound of these lives slip away. There's anything timeless in the tide's air — a thing that calls to the part of us that recalls wherever we got from.
Since we came from the water once.
The wave carried life onto the land. It cradled the initial delicate creatures that dared to crawl from the shallows. And probably this is exactly why we sense so small standing before it today — perhaps not since it can take from people, but because in a few deep, unspoken way, we know it gave people every thing first.
Stay there good enough, and you'll begin to spot the details. The quiet pull at your ankles because it brings away. The hiss of pockets crumbling in the foam. The light, almost human sigh since it exhales onto the sand.
If you listen strongly, you could hear the tide suggesting a truth:
“Nothing you know is permanent.
But nothing is truly missing, either.”
One day, the tide will roll around the world as if we were never here. The names of our cities, the boundaries we fought conflicts to safeguard, the monuments we developed to overcome time — the whole thing will undoubtedly be swept out, melted, and carried into the deep.
And yet… there is a strange comfort in that.
Since the hold reminds people that people are element of something bigger than ourselves. Something which doesn't require us, but supports us all the same. Everything we do, every thing we construct, every air we get becomes section of its memory. The tide keeps it, even whenever we are gone.
You will never know all that it carries. Nothing of us will.
But the next occasion you're at the seaside, stop. Have the draw at your feet. Watch the dunes draw lines in the mud, then eliminate them without hesitation. Understand that the exact same tide handled lives you may never match and may touch lives long after yours.
It does not subject in the event that you forget.
The wave won't.
The tides won't ever tell us their secrets.
But if you are quiet enough, you might feel them in your bones.
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