In the dead of night, I sit at the edge of the dock.
My dirty sneakers dangle above the inky water churning unevenly. I squint into the black expanse before me, now both the sea and the sky. The line where the waves kissed the clouds no longer exists, erased hours ago between one blink and the next as the night became incrementally darker.
A brisk breeze sticks strands of hair against my lips. I don’t move, engulfed in the kind of silence an astronaut feels untethered in space.
Whoosh. A wave crashes against the dock poles and sprays my legs, a brief break in the quiet.
I wonder where everything went. Earlier in the day, the seaside bustled and overflowed with the sporadic honking of cars finding parking, the ceaseless clicking of teenagers taking profile pictures and the slap of cannonballs from the dock. Amid this chaos, the slip and slide of the tide on the pebbled shore grounded the town’s inhabitants with a steady pulse, like the swing of a pendulum or the soft hush of a mother rocking her baby.
But gradually, the town quieted like it was drained of battery. The sun dipped behind the mountains, snatching away the fiery watercolours rippling across the waves. People left the coast, retreating to their bed sheets. The buildings flicked off their lights.
At night, stripped of everything but its salty residue in the air, the sea looks different.
Earlier, I stood on the shore and cold water rushed into my slightly-dirtier sneakers. I watched a toddler splash her feet in the water, squealing in delight. But at some point, the sea receded into low tide. The translucent water transformed into a ghoulish pool and now the same waves tug at a sailboat tied to the dock, coaxing it away from civilization like it’s trying to drag it further and further into a desolate expanse until the sailboat tilts on its side and the water swallows it up.
But below the dock, the waves still slip and slide, back and forth. They are simply waves — they could soothe you or kill you, but they aren’t striving for either.
Against the vast background of blackness, without the town, the sky and the shore, the sea simply exists alone — so alone it almost doesn’t exist.
I feel a kinship with the water, wondering if I’m living my days as mechanically as the slip and slide of the tide. I lie on my back, letting the damp wood press against my shoulders and the black sky blanket me. Here in the dead of night in the chilly air, it’s like I have nothing but the bare bones of my soul.
I lay here, on the flat wooden planks, stripped of everything but my clothes, and wonder what is left of me.
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