The Sea

 The waves are touching my toes. Cold, then gone, then cold again.

I am sitting alone on the beach. No one is nearby. The vastness of it makes my head swim — this endless gray-green water stretching further than I can hold in my eyes. I try to sing Rabindranath. The words come out, softly, into the salt air. But the sea doesn't care about my song. The sea doesn't care about me at all. And somehow, that is the most honest thing I have felt in a long time.

Who am I? The question arrives without invitation, the way big questions always do — not in a quiet room with a cup of tea, but here, at the edge of something enormous.

I notice a snail near my feet. Small. Unhurried. Moving with the kind of certainty that has nothing to do with speed. A little further away, resting against a large wet stone, is a blue jellyfish — translucent, otherworldly, like a thought not yet formed.

Then — without warning — a huge wave.

It comes the way loss sometimes comes. Not announced. Not apologized for. It simply arrives and takes both of them — the snail and the jellyfish — pulling them back into the throat of the sea.

The rain begins.

I don't move. The drops find my shoulders, my hair, the song still humming somewhere inside me. I look out at the horizon where a ship is moving — impossibly far, a dark shape against the sky. I can't see the people on it. They can't see me either. Two kinds of solitude, travelling parallel, never meeting.

Then — the snail comes back.

I almost laugh. There it is. Emerging from the foam as if it had only stepped out for a moment. Moving slowly. Steadily. As if it has all the time in the world — because it understands something I am still learning. That the sea is not an ending. It is just a wave.

Lightning cracks the sky and swallows my song mid-note.

I am cold. I stand.

And then I begin walking — not away from the water, but toward it. Just a little more. Just a step. And another. The cold should sharpen, but instead something loosens in my chest. It is warm here, somehow. Or perhaps I have simply stopped noticing the cold. The world goes quiet in a way that feels less like silence and more like forgetting — the ship, the snail, the song, the question.

Who am I?

The water rises to my knees. I keep walking.

To my waist now. The rain is falling harder. The waves push against me, and I push back, or perhaps I stop pushing back — I can't tell anymore. The sea fills the spaces between my fingers, wraps around my ribs, holds me the way nothing on the shore ever has. Cold and warm at once. Heavy and weightless together.

The question doesn't feel so urgent out here.

A wave lifts me slightly off my feet. Just for a moment. Just enough to remind me that I am small — beautifully, terrifyingly small — and that the sea has been asking the same question long before I arrived on this beach, and will keep asking long after.

I am neck-deep now. The rain and the sea have become one thing. I have become one thing with them too — or I am beginning to.

The ship on the horizon blinks once through the dark. A tiny light. Distant and steady.

Who am I?

Maybe the answer isn't on the shore. Maybe it was never a question meant for dry land.

I float.