A year ago I wrote a draft of a post explaining why I loved the ocean, as to explain why I gave this blog the name aquapages. The problem is that I’ve yet to find the right word to describe how or why I love the ocean. So as I’ve put some thought into the design of this thing, finally, I thought why not post a little snippet of the explanation behind the name and the strange level of interest for someone who isn’t on or in the ocean that much.
I don’t think I could ever live in a place far from an ocean or any body of water that I can look out on. The light-dark-blue-green-black everchanging color calms me, the open space makes anything seem possible as my chest expands and is rid of worry, the endless movement energizes me. It makes me feel entirely too small and too grounded at the same time. I get the same feeling that drives people to look up at the nightsky. But when the nightsky seems the same every night, and my neck gets tired of arching the weight of my head, the ocean always seem to be right in front of me and different from an hour before.
The quality is so bad because the photo was taken so long ago
I have never been happier in my life than when I feel my body floating, when all I am able to smell is salt. It eases pain, it’s probably the only time my body is all one temperature because my hands and nose are always too cold. Here in Norway, especially further north, the water is always too cold, too restless, too dangerous. I should curse the ocean, I should stay away and despise it. My mother is afraid of it, even before it took the latest family member. In a family of part-time fishermen more than a handful of people has been taken by the ocean at this point, even if I only know the name of the latest three of them. Still it’s just as dangerous as the beautiful nature here always is, a reminder of what humans never can conquer all of, something that never can be child proof. Small accidents are reminders to not make bigger mistakes. To be a good swimmer. We take our precautions, sometimes, but other times there’s whales – enormous whales, a flock of them, sprouting water from the holes in their back like in the kid’s cartoons and every tiny white plastic or wooden boat is trying to get as close as possible.
Have you ever seen how strange water moves? How sound travel in water? How objects move in water? How when the melted ice that’s river water meets the ocean it creates a weird mix that I’m not entirely too happy about because it’s not salty enough? (More salty water just smells different and tastes different and makes you float better, still people don’t understand my problem with it being less salty.) I can lie just beneath the water surface, sound warped just enough so that I feel isolated from my surroundings – but still aware of what’s happening – and watch the living world underneath me through a scuba mask for hours.
aquapages 