Dark waves rolling, crashing endlessly, 

without end…

A world within a world, within a universe
and yet each front quiet, not a word to be heard.
The vastness of the sea - rich and empty.

The shoreline empty, not another soul in sight.
Never any other souls in sight.
Always alone,
even in places so filled with others, 
I do not appear to them,
I do not exist.

So I come to the sea,
watching the waves roll in 
again and again.
Waiting for it to tell me something, 
anything.

Hoping, wishing, 
waiting for it to fill me up.
For the shore to fill my lungs with salt air,
for the ocean to fill me up with its vastness.
Anything to keep
from feeling the weight
of the world’s emptiness. 
Anything to feel solid,
to feel real.

The sea drowns in itself
over and over again,
never ending, never fading,
Simply merging with the skyline.
Without end, 
those crashing waves
making a muted roar,
whispering to me the truth.
Nothing matters, nothing will ever
matter.

Because when the world turns into oblivion
and life ceases to exist,
the sea will keep churning 
and drowning
in its own endlessness.

It will all be empty,
barren,
devoid of anything that once mattered.
Not a trace of life to be found.
Just the sea and the land and the clouds and 
the sun and the stars and the spaces in between. 
Sand and dust will dance
upon the surface of the earth 
and out into the abyss,
the never ending abyss of space.
Dark and lonely and empty
our blue planet,
our small,
insignificant existences,
gone.

Those are the secrets the ocean whispered to me.
And then the soft, granular sands 
grew cold between my toes,
the sun burnt out,
overheated, bloated, 
red with exhaustion.
It shed its last rays for as long as it could,
prolonging the inevitable,
trying desperately to heat the world just a little more,
the sky growing darker and darker,
the sea reflecting the void.

And I was alone with it, 
the void
unremitting in its endlessness. 
And it told me its secrets too.
That great emptiness, 
peppered with light.
From gases that have burnt out,
stars no longer where we picture them,
stars that have since fallen.

Some gave up long ago, 
in the past, our future,
their echoes of life,
echoing what is to come of us,
seen for eons,
they twinkle,
listening to us,
to our wishes, our hopes, our dreams.
and they do nothing.

Because they are not beings of which to wish upon.
They are balls of fire so hot, 
the space around them crackles
and is empty
like our great sun.
For when it becomes so bloated and red,
expanding beyond physical limits,
it will touch and melt our empty planet,
along with all the others,
engulfing our galaxy in white hot flame.
Just before exploding from within,
turning everything to dust. 

Then when the universe is at its end,
when the great cosmic forces

begin to decelerate,
when life is forbidden,
the cosmos will go gently 

into the night
as life does not wish to go 
gently, so gently.

This is what I gleaned from the sea 
and the sky 
and the space in between,
in all its infinite, unending wisdom.

And I felt burdened,
no more than before I had looked out
at the sea and the sky,
at the never-ending worlds of space and time. 
Constantly feeling the weight of my futile existence,
the weight of the universe’s emptiness
weighing me down tenfold.