The Sea Has Always Been Louder Than Me

The sea has always been louder than me... 

Than us... 

...than them.

So often I’ve witnessed attempts to shout it down. Not a single success. Not a single wave could their voices restrain.

With fish for thoughts, our ocean, it is too contradictory to sleep. 

Even when the water’s calm it can never be silent. For in those moments the salt of all the tears we’ve ever cried speak of sadness, paint its depths a heavier blue, a darker and more twisted shade. 

And so our silences sink helplessly, a little further each year, deeper than any hope in any wishing well. 

These days therefore, instead of voices, I read thoughts as words posted in the sand, watch as the waves wash them away. Each hieroglyph beneath my toes proof of those others who have learnt like me, the secrets of the sadness of the sea, of this dumping ground full of painful moods and memories...

...of introspection beneath surface peace.

"Boats are the nearest thing to dreams that hands have ever made." ~ Robert N. Rose

As If the Sea Should Part, 

by Emily Dickinson

As if the Sea should part

And show a further Sea --

And that -- a further -- and the Three

But a presumption be --

Of Periods of Seas --

Unvisited of Shores --

Themselves the Verge of Seas to be --

Eternity -- is Those --

“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.” ~ Hermann Broch

“Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!” ~ John Keats

“ The walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by, with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year, to where the wild things are” ~ Maurice Sendak, ‘Where The Wild Things Are’

Further Links:

Maddie Joyce

Bryn Hall

James Kamo