Rutuja Shelke
As a kid I had always been fascinated by the ocean and its magnificent waves. Looking at it from the hilltop where me and my family used to go every summer, I used to think to myself how I wanted to be like it. So fluid yet so solid, it looked so small that I could curl my fingers around it and form a circle and it would fit into that, but yet, it was so vast. Something which looked so consumable, yet so in-consumable.
Of course, I didn’t understand the magnitude of my attraction to the ocean at that time, hence I used to say I liked it “because I can float and fly at the same time.” For when I used to float in the water, and look up at the never ending sky, I felt as if I were flying. The ocean merged with the blue sky and formed a world where I could fly, a world where there was no horizon, a world full of possibilities and never-ending promises.
Now as I sat on the shore, inhaling the sweet and salty flavour of the breezer in my hand mixed with sea water, and watched for the hundredth time how the waves crashed against this one particularly rock, looking so powerful and consuming yet being shattered by the rigid and lonely looking rock, I thought to myself how ironic it was that something so grand with such great speed and force could be shattered so easily by a rock planted firmly against it. The rock didn’t move an inch or even flinch as the stubborn waves kept crashing against it. At the end of it, the waves were the ones that had to change their course and not the rock. No matter how lonely it looked, it was standing against the vast ocean, all alone and yet it was winning against the force.
And that’s when I decided I wanted to be a rock and not a wave or the fluid never ending water mass named the ocean anymore. I wanted to be that small mass in this comically large universe and stand a chance to survive in it. No matter what kind of wave the world would play against me, I would stand my ground and the problems would just have to change their course.