The Seas of Change

Tariq gazed out onto the rocky shores of the Pacific Ocean, his eyes glazed, lost in thought. The seas of change—his father would always say—the seas of change ebb and flow, and sweep away your troubles so. Tariq had always wondered where his father had picked up such a phrase; it sounded Irish, or from some other European seafaring nation—nowhere whose soil his father’s feet had touched. Still, whenever he would see his youngest son looking troubled, he’d repeat this idiom: the seas of change ebb and flow, and sweep away your troubles so. It had been repeated to him so often that at some point Tariq stopped listening—that is until this day, many years later, as he sat alone without a father to notice his troubles; and how could he, when it was his absence, his passing, that tethered his son to the shipwrecked hulls that lined the bottom of the ocean. The seas of change wouldn’t reach him there.