Whenever I end up at my family home, one thing that I almost always accomplish is taking a drive to the beach. The ocean offers such an expansive view of both nothing and everything at once, in a similar way that looking up at the sky on a clear, dark night often has. There is a whole world under the surface, but all I get to see is the horizon line. It’s interesting to think about how that line between sea and sky could once instill such fear into people who worried about everything they didn’t know the answers to. How I feel about the future is the same as the way they may have felt about that distant horizon line. I don’t know where I will be going, but at least I think I know where I’ve been.
I haven’t been feeling the way I did before. I used to get the sense that everything I was thinking was always on the tip of my tongue, just out of my reach. I couldn’t access the words and thoughts which left me constantly panicking. I no longer experience this sensation as consistently as I once did in the past. I didn’t seem to notice as the frenzy for my missing thoughts slowly faded, but once I did, I was left with a different, more familiar sort of dilemma: the impression of being lost. It is a hard feeling to describe, but one that I’ve known for much longer. It is at these times that I usually end up at the ocean, searching for something that I know I won’t find there. But sometimes there is comfort in feeling small against a body of water that seems limitless.
chimera
- in Greek mythology: a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail; any mythical animal with parts taken from various animals.
- a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve; an illusion or fabrication of the mind
- an organism containing a mixture of genetically different tissues, formed by processes such as fusion of early embryos, grafting, or mutation.
