It comes in waves
All I know is that it comes in waves.
At first the water is calm. The water is our life. It carpets out infront of us in various shades of marine as it sits there and plays with the sunlight. Yet it is constantly moving, swirling, bobbing; fly above it and you see white licks like scratches on the polished surface.
Then it starts to gain energy and move and swell from afar, from where we can't see. Before you know, it rises from its crouched, hunched position, standing up before you, broadening its boulder shoulders until it shrouds over you, opening its jaws and then crashes upon you with all its bite. The force it musters is incredible, hitting you square in the chest and takes your breath away, leaving you gasping. Once you are perirously underneath you have no orientation, nothing to hold on to. Everything you have is given to finding a way out, finding some air relief. All we want is to breathe.
Over thousands of years, before anyone of us came along, the sea had already earned respect. We all want to live by its shores, even if we don't want to swim in it. A vast open space, it gives us a gaze of freedom. We marvel over how it moves and shapes and carries surfers on its crests, gazing on the beauty captured by photographers.
Like one of those surfers sitting on his board, legs dangling, watching and waiting in the lulls for the right moment, willing for the wave to come from the distance, sometimes I can feel the swell creep. Except that I have no will for it to be upon me. I just want that peace, sat there on the board. Many surfers say it's all about being in the right place at the right time, but I am in the wrong place, this is such a wrong time. As much as I like to watch for hours those who surf, I am not a surfer, I struggle to even swim.
Some waves are small, hardly big enough to jump up on a surfboard to, there is not enough friction between the atmosphere and the ocean for them to generate. We can come back in to the shore without catching one and feel frustrated at the lack of a pipeline or a shorebreak, because if water is life, these are the thrills, the challenges which we as a human race are born to take on and overcome. We want more in life than ripples and take risks to get them. We endeavour to be the stoked surfer.
Even in monster waves when the bellowing weather becomes an ally like at Nazaré in Portugal in winter. Heavy, thick, swooping brushstrokes of ocean ladened with globs of paint from an intoxicated artist not caring where they go or how they go about it.
But not a slab of concrete so big, so overwhelming where there is no way out. The wave that drops like an atomic bomb, where even if you survive the hit, the weight that presses on you after you tumble down on to a treacherous reef to keep you under, leaves you so weak and drags the life out of you. You succumb, you are immersed. It has no pity, it is brutal.
Sometimes it is a smaller wave; if you don't see the swell and it comes out of nowhere it will engulf you all the same. What seems rideable instead breaks your board in two, it snaps the cord attached to your ankle. A rip tide does not look so big from the beach, but they can unsuspectingly sweep you out to sea if you are caught up in one. After all we can drown in a few centimetres of water in a bath tub.
So all I know is that grief comes in waves.
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