#09 Spring Tides
The open sea beat violently against the rocks. Backwards and forwards. It curved over itself in irregular movements. It was almost always heavy in that area, wild.
When he was still a child, he would ask Grandfather, in the midst of countless stories of brave sailors and sea giants yet to be discovered, “how many tides fit in this sea?”. And he would recall that his grandfather invariably answered “as many as you can count”.
Sometimes he went alone to the sea wall in front of his house. And he would add up the movements of the turbulent waters that came and went. But he always concluded that the task was too much for his limited capacity to associate all the numbers he knew. And then he would lose himself, because there were never two identical tides.
Years later he had heard that “there is sea and sea …” and he would try to guess where it was beyond the line of the horizon. Whenever he looked at infinity, from the height of that huge sea wall, he would remember that he could never count the tides of that sea.
The fact is that he also never knew where so much sea went. But he knew that it always came. However much it had to leave again.
