xigekey
493 posts
Jul 29, 2025
11:14 PM
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Photograph this.
You're ranking barefoot at the edge of the ocean. The air is large with salt, the sky decorated in bruised purples and firelight from the desperate sun. The dunes race ahead, styling and breaking at the feet, before dropping silently back to the depths.
But that is not just water touching you.
Because every tide… carries memory.
The same tide that brushes against your ankles tonight after swept over sides you may never know. It buried forgotten cities, cooled lava since it built from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that existed before individuals actually wanted walking upright. It carried the ashes of fires that burnt out a lot of decades ago. It has used the bones of sailors who faded in to the night time, their comments swallowed by wind and water.
And now it details you.
The tide requires bits of the world with it everytime it retreats — grains of mud from mountains that fell sometime ago, shells that once sheltered lives smaller when compared to a fingernail, pieces of rock and glass utilized clean from generations of tumbling. Wherever do they go? To the places we cannot see. In to trenches greater than Everest is tall, in to black canyons wherever light hasn't touched, into currents that range the world like arteries.
The hold hides everything it gathers, burying the world's thoughts in a stop also huge for us to break.
We tell ourselves we realize it. We information their habits, build walls and harbors to battle it, title the hours when it will rise and fall. However the tide does not value our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It concentrates and then the moon.
That soft cat in the sky, remote and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every moment of each day. The water stretches toward it, rising to meet its hidden hand. And when the moon converts away, the water comes back. This silent tug-of-war has shaped the world for billions of years. Even the deepest seas are tethered to something beyond themselves.
The tide is changing.
It's creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are reduction in to their depths, heating seas are swelling their body, and shorelines are vanishing bit by piece. Islands we after believed endless are actually removed, reduced to just names on previous maps.
And listed here is the facts many people don't need to face: the wave won't end for us.
We call it disaster. The wave calls it nothing at all. It really remains, since it generally has, getting and providing, sculpting and erasing. It's removed whole continents before. It will do therefore again.
Can you envision the long run?
The ocean sheets within the cities we built. Streets disappear under the waves, their asphalt damaged and broken like previous bone. Systems fall to the search, turning into reefs where fish drift through silent glass halls. Monuments fall, destroyed and dispersed until they're indistinguishable from the rocks of the seabed. Whole civilizations are paid off to parts, overly enthusiastic by currents therefore solid we will never move against them.
And when it happens, the wave will not roar. It will not rage. It won't mourn.
It only will remember.
Because that's what the wave does. It is the planet's memory. Every living, every storm, every reduction is flattened in to its depths and moved forward. The hold has seen whole worlds rise and fall. It understands things number human language can actually hold.
However the tide is not only a thief. It is a sculptor.
It gives life to the shore. It carries nutritional elements to estuaries and marshlands wherever new animals are born. It designs the ends of the planet earth, removing sharp rocks into delicate stones, remaking shores with every breath. Minus the tide, the planet's pulse could falter. Oceans might stagnate. Coastlines could wither.
Maybe that's why we are drawn to it.
We head to the water's side without generally understanding why. Kids chase the retreating dunes, joking, then shriek when it rushes straight back toward them. Adults stay at the shoreline all night, hypnotized by the beat, allowing the sound of their lives slide away. There is something endless in the tide's breath — a thing that calls to the portion of us that recalls wherever we got from.
Since we came from the water once.
The wave carried living onto the land. It cradled the first delicate creatures that dared to get from the shallows. And probably that's why we sense so small ranking before it now — maybe not because normally it takes from us, but because in some strong, unspoken way, we realize it gave people everything first.
Stay there long enough, and you'll start to notice the details. The calm tug at your legs since it draws away. The hiss of pockets crumbling in the foam. The faint, nearly human sigh because it exhales onto the sand.
In the event that you listen directly, you may hear the tide telling you a truth:
“Nothing you know is permanent.
But nothing is really missing, either.”
1 day, the tide will roll around the planet as if we were never here. The titles of our cities, the edges we fought wars to safeguard, the monuments we built to outlive time — everything is likely to be taken Planet, melted, and carried in to the deep.
And yet… there is an odd comfort in that.
As the hold tells people that people are element of anything bigger than ourselves. A thing that doesn't need us, but holds all of us the same. Every thing we do, every thing we construct, every air we get becomes part of its memory. The hold maintains it, also whenever we are gone.
You will never know all that it carries. None folks will.
But next time you are at the beach, stop. Feel the draw at your feet. View the dunes bring lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Understand that the exact same hold touched lives you'll never meet and can touch lives long following yours.
It doesn't matter in the event that you forget.
The wave won't.
The tides won't ever inform us their secrets.
But when you are calm enough, you might sense them in your bones.
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