Chapter Eight — The Entity of the Sea

There are moments on a cruise that I especially wait for.

Not the arrival at a new port, not the sight of a city from afar, and not even the sunset.

Precisely the moment when the land disappears.

When I stand on the deck and look in every direction, and see nothing but water and sky.

I have sailed many times in my life, and yet this sight still moves me.

I can stand before the sea for hours without getting bored.

There are days when it is almost smooth, and days when the waves are high and the wind strong. Sometimes its color is a deep blue, sometimes greenish, and at certain hours it looks almost silver.

But it is not only the sight that draws me.

There is something in the feeling that I am in the heart of a vast space, far from everything familiar to me.

One evening I stood on the deck at dusk.

The ship moved slowly, and behind it stretched a white trail of foam that gradually disappeared into the water.

I watched it for a long time.

After all, only a moment ago the ship had passed exactly at this place, and already almost no sign of it remained.

I thought of all the times I had come to the sea with thoughts that gave me no rest.

Why is it that facing it I sometimes manage to think differently?

And what is there in it that makes me return to it again and again?

⸻

I tried to imagine the sea as an entity I could converse with.

But this time I did not want to grant it a face or a human body.

I felt that any figure I chose would be too small for it.

I could not imagine a voice either.

There were the wind, the waves, the murmur of water along the ship's side.

Perhaps this time the conversation would have to take place differently.

"Do you even hear me?" I asked in my heart.

A wave broke against the side, and small spray of water rose into the air.

I smiled.

Of course that was not an answer.

But I went on playing with the thought.

"I have been talking to you for years," I said in my imagination. "Sometimes when I am sad, sometimes when I am happy, and sometimes simply because I love looking at you."

The water kept moving.

"And you never tell me what to do."

I looked toward the horizon.

Perhaps that is one of the things I love about the sea.

It does not try to persuade me, console me, or correct my thoughts.

I can stand before it with everything that occupies me, without feeling I need to explain a thing.

But is it really the sea that grants me this feeling?

Or perhaps I simply allow myself to be different when I am near it?

⸻

"There is something that makes me curious," I continued in the imagined conversation. "Why do you look as though you keep nothing?"

I watched the trail of foam behind the ship.

A few minutes earlier it was clear and white, and now it had already merged with the water.

"We, human beings, carry so much of the past with us," I said. "Memories, regrets, sentences we heard, things we would like to change. And with you it seems that everything that happens disappears almost at once."

But even before I finished thinking it, I understood that this image is not accurate.

The sea does not truly erase everything that passes through it.

In its depths lie remains of ships, lost objects, traces of events that took place hundreds of years ago.

The water itself also changes. It carries heat, salts, substances, and living creatures from place to place.

"So perhaps you do not forget," I said. "You simply do not keep things in a form I am used to recognizing."

I thought of the conversation I held in my imagination with Memory.

Perhaps with us too there are things that change until we no longer recognize their original form, and yet they continue to be part of us.

"But there is something I envy in you," I admitted.

The wind blew a few strands of hair over my face.

"I can remember something that happened years ago, and feel it almost as if it took place yesterday. Sometimes I would like to know how one sets a memory aside without losing it."

The sea did not answer.

And I thought that perhaps this is not a question that can be addressed to it at all.

After all, the ability to remember is also one of the most precious things we have.

I would not want to forget the people I loved, the places I have been, the moments that changed me.

Perhaps I do not want fewer memories.

Perhaps I only want not all of them to hurt with the same intensity.

⸻

The ship continued on its way.

In the distance a few birds circled above the water.

"Why does everything look smaller facing you?" I asked.

I looked at the vast space around me.

On land I am used to seeing clear boundaries.

Streets, buildings, fences, windows, doors.

Everything has a defined place.

But in the heart of the sea it is hard to find a boundary.

Even the horizon, which looks like a clear line, is not really the edge of the water.

It is only the limit of what I am able to see.

I liked that thought.

"How many times in life do I treat what I see as though it were all that exists?" I asked.

Sometimes we are sure we understand a certain situation, because we know the part that is before our eyes.

But beyond it there may be details we do not know, circumstances we are unfamiliar with, and possibilities that have not yet occurred to us.

I thought of arguments I had had, of decisions I had made, of people I had judged too quickly.

"Perhaps the horizon reminds me of something I forget in daily life," I said. "That my sight is always limited."

But immediately another question rose in me.

If I cannot see the whole picture, how can one make decisions with confidence at all?

After all, one cannot wait until we know everything.

Perhaps we simply learn to live with the knowledge that there will always be something beyond the horizon.

⸻

"There is another thing that interests me about you," I said to the sea. "You can look so calm, and within hours turn into a dangerous place."

I remembered cruises in which the waves were so high that I felt the ship move from side to side.

There were times when I watched the sea in wonder, and times when I preferred to move away from the window.

"We love to speak of your beauty," I went on, "but sometimes we forget how much power there is in you."

The waves around the ship were moderate that evening.

And yet, I knew there was no promise of tomorrow in that quiet sight.

I thought of the people whose lives are tied to the sea.

Sailors, fishermen, researchers, people who work on it for years.

They surely know sides of it that I, as a passenger standing on a comfortable and relatively safe deck, almost never meet.

"Perhaps that is one of our mistakes," I said. "We tend to think that a beautiful thing is necessarily also a good thing for us."

But nature does not act according to our expectations.

A storm does not happen in order to punish us, just as a quiet day does not arrive in order to make us happy.

The sea does not direct itself toward our lives.

It exists according to forces and processes far greater than us.

There is something daunting in that thought.

But also something that allows us to see the world without placing ourselves at its center.

⸻

I leaned on the railing.

"Sometimes I think life is like you," I said.

I immediately smiled to myself.

How many times had I already heard that comparison?

Waves, storms, shores, voyages.

Almost everything in the sea became, at some stage, a metaphor for life.

And yet, perhaps there is a reason we return to it.

"But I am not sure the comparison is accurate," I continued. "In life we do not only drift. We also choose, change, create."

I looked at the ship I was standing on.

It itself was proof of that.

Human beings learned to build vessels, to read maps, to understand winds and currents, and to reach places that in the past were almost inaccessible.

We did not control the sea.

But we learned to conduct ourselves within it.

"Perhaps that is what interests me," I thought. "The possibility of being part of a world we do not control, and yet influencing our way within it."

There are things in life we cannot choose.

Circumstances, loss, unexpected changes.

But there are also things in which our choices matter very much.

The difficulty is that sometimes we do not know in advance what is in our control and what is not.

"And perhaps that is why I love to sail," I said. "There is something strange in the feeling that I am moving to another place, even though I am standing almost without moving."

The ship carried me forward.

I did not need to do a thing except be on it.

⸻

The evening grew darker.

The first lights came on along the deck, and a few passengers came out to photograph the sky.

"I want to ask you something else," I said to the sea.

"Why are people so drawn to you?"

I thought of beaches full of people, of cities built beside water, of houses whose windows face the sea.

There are those who love to swim, others who love to sail, and some who make do with sitting on the shore.

I can understand all of them.

But what exactly are we looking for there?

Perhaps the movement.

The sea never looks exactly the same, even when we return to the same place.

Perhaps the sounds.

The waves returning to the shore create a rhythm one can listen to for a long time without tiring.

And perhaps the feeling that we are facing something so great that we can set down, for a moment, everything that fills our lives.

"But there are also people who do not love you," I said. "Those who fear the depth, the waves, the fact that one cannot see what lies beneath the surface."

I thought about how the same space that awakens freedom in me can awaken insecurity in another person.

The sea does not change according to who stands before it.

But our experience of it is entirely different.

And perhaps that is also one of the reasons I return to it.

It reminds me that the world does not look to everyone the way it looks to me.

⸻

"There is something I have never understood," I said after a while. "Why can I sit before you for hours, even when nothing special is happening?"

I looked at the waves.

One rose slightly above another, broke apart, and disappeared.

After it came another one.

And again.

There is no clear story here, I thought.

There is no beginning, middle, and end.

And yet, I am not bored.

Perhaps because I do not always need a story.

During the day I am used to doing things with a purpose.

To finish a task, to arrive at a place, to understand something, to receive an answer.

But facing the sea I can simply observe.

Not try to achieve a thing.

"Perhaps you are one of the only places where I do not feel a need to do something with my time," I said.

I remembered the first conversation I imagined with Time.

How much the thought had occupied me then — of the passing years, of what I had managed and what I had not.

And now I stood before the sea, and it did not matter to me to know how much time had passed.

Perhaps because I was exactly in the place where I wanted to be at that moment.

⸻

The darkness had already covered the water.

The ship continued on its way, and only the lit trail of foam behind it testified to the movement.

"I think I understand a little more why I return to you," I said.

I did not expect an answer.

"I do not come only to relax. Sometimes I come to think. Sometimes to remember. And sometimes because I want to feel that I am in an entirely different place."

The sea kept moving.

"But perhaps there is something more," I added. "When I stand before you, I remember how big the world is and how little of it I truly know."

I thought of all the places I have not yet reached.

Of shores I have not seen, of islands whose names I have never heard, of people's lives taking place far from my route.

That knowledge did not make me feel small or unimportant.

It awakened curiosity in me.

⸻

I stayed on the deck a few more minutes.

The water was already so dark that it was hard to distinguish one wave from another.

I thought of all the times I had stood before the sea in different periods of my life.

I did not always come to it with the same thoughts.

Sometimes I was happy, sometimes worried, and sometimes I simply wanted to get away from routine for a while.

The sea was different each time.

And so was I.

Perhaps that is why I do not feel I am returning again and again to the same place.

I return to a familiar sight, but I meet it from within a life that has kept changing.

Before I went back inside, I looked once more toward the horizon.

I could not see what lay beyond the darkness.

I knew there was more water there, and after it perhaps land, cities, people, and places I did not know.

I placed my hand on the railing and listened to the murmur of the waves.

This time I did not try to ask a thing.

I stayed another moment with this sight, and then I returned to the lit ship.

Continue to Chapter Nine: The Entity of Curiosity

© 2026 Nurit Rozenblat. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without the author's prior written permission.