Where the Water Waits

Where the Water Waits

Most people, if you asked them, would say their favorite place was somewhere warm—somewhere bright. A beach, maybe, with white sand and gold pouring from the sky. But she was different.

She never came for the sun.

Never for the sand.

She came for the hush.

At first glance, she looked like the others. Towel slung over one arm. Sunglasses perched precariously atop her windblown hair. Her feet pressed tentative prints into the damp morning shore, erasing themselves as quickly as they appeared. To a stranger, she was just another visitor wrapped in the casual costume of leisure.

But if you watched closely—and almost no one ever did—you might notice something strange in the set of her shoulders, a tension that did not belong to vacationers or day-trippers. You might catch how her eyes skipped past the shimmering sun and the laughing gulls and searched, always, for something just beyond.

The water was gray that morning, brushed with the bruised purples of a sky that couldn’t quite decide whether to weep or sing. Cold foamed at the edges where the tide licked the beach, a low murmur like the breath of some great sleeping thing. The sand was packed firm from last night’s storm, ridged and rippled like the skin of some ancient creature.

The world behind her—the one she'd dragged herself free from—still clattered faintly in her bones. There were the flashing traffic lights stuck on yellow, the never-ending screech of trains gnawing against their tracks, the shrill bleating of unanswered phones. Always phones. Always demands. Spreadsheets stacking themselves like tombstones on a glowing screen.

She walked until the screen dissolved from her mind, pixel by pixel, carried away by the salt breeze.

The soundscape shifted. Where once there had been the frantic clicking of keyboards and the static of fluorescent lights, now there was only the slow, sighing hush of waves, a breath drawn in, a breath released.

Without hesitation, she stepped into the water.

The chill snapped against her skin, a thousand sharp little teeth, but she did not flinch. The deeper she waded, the less the earth seemed to matter. The less she seemed to matter. Each footfall a little lighter, a little less tethered.

When she floated, the world inverted itself.

Her ears sank beneath the surface, and the roar of existence faded into a muffled hum—like the heartbeat of a giant creature, or the last, slow chug of a distant train disappearing into fog. The sky stretched vast above her, a pale, endless lid. The ocean below, a slow-turning mirror swallowing her whole.

Here, she could no longer hear the buzzing of plans, or the metallic clatter of deadlines inside her skull. No screeching halts. No sudden crashes. Just... hush. As if the world itself exhaled and forgot, for a moment, to draw back in.

The beach itself seemed to change as she floated further from the shore. The colors dimmed, softened, as if someone had dipped the horizon in milk and left it to curdle. The bright banners of beach towels shrank into flecks of spilled paint. Children's shrieks softened into distant bird calls. Even the gulls themselves grew quiet, gliding overhead like the thoughts she no longer had to think.

The water cradled her, a slow, deliberate rocking. The kind of motion you might remember from a dream you forgot upon waking. She let her arms drift wide, fingers trailing lazy shapes into the surface tension. Salt stung tiny cuts on her palms she hadn't even realized were there.

Above her, the sky sagged heavy with cloud, great pillows of steel and bruised lavender rolling over one another. The light had lost its hard edges. It was no longer morning, or afternoon. It was simply now.

Sometimes, she thought she might simply stay.

Let the tide claim her.

Let the sky erase her edges.

The ocean stretched in every direction—no signs, no schedules, no street names to bind her to a place or time. Even the pulse of her own body seemed to slow, her heart matching the deliberate pull of the tide. In, out. In, out.

No traffic.

No alarms.

No blinking red lights demanding decisions.

The office buildings, the emails screaming through fiber-optic veins, the endless meetings about meetings—they felt impossibly small now, like little kingdoms of dust on the sole of her foot.

Even her own name seemed irrelevant, bobbing just beyond reach like a message in a bottle set adrift and forgotten.

She could stay.

But even the water had a rhythm, a quiet persuasion. It would not let her disappear. It rocked her gently back toward the shore, as if to say: not yet.

No one on the beach noticed.

No one ever did.

They were busy unfurling towels, slathering lotion, adjusting umbrellas to catch just the right slice of sun. They were earth-bound, tethered by gravity and lists and all the invisible strings that stitched the world together.

But she—

She was somewhere else.

Floating not just in water, but in a space between memory and dream, between forgetting and remembering who she was before the world taught her how to perform herself into exhaustion.

She opened her eyes. A single bird—dark against the pale sky—carved slow arcs overhead. Its wings tilted lazily, riding unseen currents. It did not hurry. It did not rush toward some waiting destination. It was simply being.

She smiled then, a real one this time, stitched not of politeness but of some secret knowledge too vast and too slippery to explain.

She let herself drift closer to the shore, feeling the sand reach up to kiss her toes. She was still there—on the edge of two worlds. Not claimed entirely by either.

There would be no parade to welcome her back to the land. No medals for surviving the noise. No applause for finding the quiet.

But she would know.

She would always know.

Most people love the beach.

She loved the forgetting.

Most people fear the unknown.

She had learned to float inside it.

And when the tide came again tomorrow—

She would answer.

Not with fear, but with open arms.

With ears ready for the hush.

With lungs ready for salt air.

With a heart ready to remember itself again.

Where the water waits, she waits too.