Between the Waves and What Was Lost
Feet sinking into warm sand, salty air moving through my hair, the fabric of a short dress brushing against my legs, the sun bowing itself into the horizon—this has always been the kind of place where I wanted to exist. If I could press pause anywhere, it would be here: with my toes buried in earth that dissolves into water, with the sky burning itself out in colors too beautiful to last.
I cannot recall the exact moment I fell in love with the beach. Maybe it wasn’t a moment at all, but a slow unfolding, like the tide creeping forward without asking permission. Maybe it was written into me since birth, a calling of sorts. After all, I am a Pisces—fish, creature of water, belonging to rivers, oceans, tides. Or maybe the explanation is simpler: in my hometown, the closest holiday spot was always the beach. Pasir Panjang in Singkawang, Ujung Pandaran in Kotim. Sand and salt were never far. They were both escape and homecoming.
The beach was always the place where land ended. A threshold. A border. The liminal space between departure and return, between stillness and possibility. It held me in ways no solid ground ever could.
And then, there was him.
He lived on an island so beautiful it felt like a dream—like one of those places people save up their whole lives just to visit for a week. Paradise, people called it. Blue seas, white sand, palm trees leaning into breezes as though they too were resting. And when I met him, I thought: how lucky, to belong to both him and the sea. To hold someone who came from a place that mirrored everything I loved most.
But life rarely gives us what we expected.
When I told him how much I loved the beach, he looked at me almost with disdain. He told me he hated it. No reason, no story, no childhood memory that made sense of the dislike. Just a blunt declaration: “I hate the beach.”
At first, I laughed. I thought it was teasing. Maybe he was being dramatic, or ironic, or simply trying to stand apart from the cliché of “island boy who loves the ocean.” But the more I asked, the more I realized he meant it. He hated it—not with rage, not with passion, but with a kind of cold indifference that I couldn’t reconcile with the vast tenderness of the sea.
It startled me, though I didn’t admit it then. How could someone hate something so endless? How could someone despise the very shore that birthed him?
Still, I brushed it off. We were in love—or at least I thought we were—and I didn’t yet understand how even the smallest fractures can grow into canyons when left unattended.
Our "ship" ended badly, like a storm that breaks the shore into fragments and pulls everything away without apology. There was no soft goodbye, no slow drifting. Just destruction. Silence. Absence.
And then came the irony.
Because now, after it all, he goes to the beach. Not just once. Every time he returns to his hometown, he visits that shore he once rejected. He walks the sand. He stares at the horizon. The very place he told me he hated has become his habit, his ritual.
I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s healing, or guilt, or loneliness. Maybe he finally recognized what I always knew. Maybe he needs the water to wash him clean of the people he has hurt, the mistakes he carries. Maybe it has nothing to do with me at all. I’ll never know.
What I do know is this: I cannot follow. I made a promise to myself that I will never touch his shore.
It is a cruel promise, in some ways. For me, the beach is not just a place—it is sanctuary, salvation, the one consistent love I have ever had. To deny myself a coastline feels like holding my breath underwater. But I know what it would mean, what it would reopen, what salt would sting. To step onto his beach would be to let memory claim me again, to let his absence walk beside me in the sand.
So I wander through coasts I do not know, walking along unfamiliar sands with the weight of insincerity and the idea of false love clinging to me like damp air.
The sea is still vast, still endless, but it feels lonelier now—an expanse that only reminds me of absence. I used to imagine my life with him here, side by side, watching sunsets bleed themselves into the horizon.
A forever shaped by the sound of waves.
But that vision belongs to a life I will never live.
Now, I search new horizons knowing I will never find another one like him. The one I wanted to love for eternity. The one I still cannot unlove, even as the tide insists on pulling me forward.
Oh dear, how pathetic.
— from @nomattere
