The boy that I was, found a fragment of a salt-wet tile glistening on the beach, basking in its impermanence in the late afternoon sun, a small treasure, a portion of a greater, more wonderful thing, thin, like a wall tile, tinged with a faded-blue pattern on a tarnished-white background, tarnished with the life it had led, broken by the untold narrative that had brought it to this beach, its curved pattern stopping abruptly at edges softened by the repetitive motions of the sea, as though a dream had melted all its sharpness away, old and misplaced, but much younger than the sea itself, lost from its original purpose, where once, hanging on the wall of a family home was passed by the lives of many, new and pristine in its youthful splendour, mellowing as children grew around, families passing through the corridors of its stationary existence, touching that bespoke pattern, then travelling on, the pitter-patter of tiny lives echoing on its hard surface, living, loving, ageing, dying, leaving no memory of their love, with the tile enduring, until one day something happened - I am only guessing at this, here on this beach of dreams, where humanity’s detritus returns with tidal regularity, gathering like insidious thoughts we wish to ignore, but cannot, may not, will not, until all unwanted flotsam and jetsam are gone - ‘the happening’, for we will call it so, may have been sudden, wrenching the tile from a position of complete rest to one of indiscriminate motion, the beginning of a undignified travelogue, resulting in the indifferent luck of all objects that are discarded carelessly into the sea, of which there are so many, too many to count, we are polluting the Earth with our greedy will to consume, yet only succeed in consuming ourselves, the beach prophesying our fate with daily accumulations dumped unceremoniously on our shores, this fragment still serving some useful purpose as it erodes, a harbinger of doom in the self-destructive war we wage with our planet, edging towards catastrophe through our foolish neglect, witnessed here with every tide, like particles of sand on this beach the reasons for our decline are all around us, yet we cannot see them, know not what we do.

April 2023