June 5, 2025
You’re six years old.
You beg your mom to let you go a little deeper.
She’s close. You promise not to go too far.
The sun is warm. The tide is soft.
The water brushes your knees, and you feel brave.
You love how it lifts you. Makes you lighter.
You lift your feet—just to see what it feels like.
It feels like flying.
You bounce with the waves, your laughter lost in the wind.
You don’t notice how far you’ve drifted.
Not yet.
The waves grow stronger, but you’ve figured out how to ride them.
Bend your knees. Time the jump.
You’re proud of how good you’re getting at this.
No one else knows how to survive this, but I do.
You forget to look back.
When you do, the beach has shifted.
Nothing looks familiar.
Your towel? Your mom? Gone.
That’s a scary place to be.
Panic slides into your lungs.
Do you go left? Right?
You don’t know. You really don’t know.
You just start swimming—fast, frantic, wrong.
The water that made you weightless now fights your limbs.
Every stroke feels smaller than it should.
What felt weightless a minute ago,
feels like a force stronger than gravity pulls you down.
That is discomfort.
When you finally reach the shore, your chest is tight.
You’re safe. But not really.
Because the panic stays.
You weren’t trying to run.
You weren’t trying to lose your place.
You just didn’t know how far the water could pull you.
You didn’t know the tide had a mind of its own.
That’s a lesson no one talks about.
Mostly because when you try to explain it, it doesn’t really make sense.
How can you be watching? Jumping? Intending to stay in place—
and still end up so far from base?
That’s what it feels like.
and before you know it—
you’d drifted further than you meant to.
And getting back…
well, maybe you never really do.
Probably because you don’t want to.
Leave a Reply