The Coast - A Search for Home

The Coast

What do you imagine when thinking about a coast?

Long white beaches made out of sand or rather gray ones with stone of all shapes and sizes. Waves gently reaching the shore before retreating. Maybe you think about something harsher. A storm. The waves violently crushing into the beach, taking with them everything that is not nailed down. The unknown lurking beyond the shore in the depth of the water.

All of those are reasonable assumptions, but this coast was nothing like this. There was no storm. The sky is blue, sprinkled with a few clouds which sometimes obscure the sun. It was not warm and the water definitely did not have a temperature you should swim in if not necessary. Even without a storm and stones it still had something cruel to it. There were no stones, as there was no sand. It was just a grass hill ending in water. Waves crashing against some earth, almost as if they were hungry. For some reason this earth was able to resist the force of water for most of the time.

Sometimes it happened that parts of the coast just broke off into the water.

At those times I was wondering whether the land will at one point be completely eaten by the sea.

I liked to come there. It was overall peaceful. I just made sure to not sit too close to the edge. It was so silent, besides the occasional bird noises. Birds were basically the only animals on this coast that lived above the water. I never knew why. There where theories at home. All of them seemed not reasonable enough for me to stay away from this coast as other mammals did.

But things changed. I was not able to come back to this coast for years now and the likelihood that I ever will is slim.

Sometimes I still dream about sitting there and looking out to the sea, feeling the cool breeze around my ears and in my hair. It was so quiet and peaceful. I felt safe. Admirable to feel like that. I have not felt like that for quite a while. Not in times like this.

***

A few years ago our crops started withering and our animals started dying. We had to leave our home or starve. Almost everyone decided to leave. Leaving our home back as a ghost town, not able to sustain live.

We still don't know what caused the dying of crops and animals. We just know that we were seemingly not affected by it. We were, but not when it came to dying. No one is willing to go back to find out what happened. It is a long way and we are a superstitious people. I find such superstition a little unreasonable but am also cautious enough to not just go on a months-long travel on my own. Even outside of superstition, this world out there is dangerous. That I learned since we left home.

Most animals and wandering bandits keep away from large groups, but if you wander off you might be confronted with them.

By now I should probably be dead, seeing how often I got in this trouble. I am just curious what lays beyond the path we are walking on and need to be alone sometimes. That is why I went to the coast at home. A place where no one would bother me. A place to be at peace.

Usually someone came to my aid before hungry beasts could finish me off or bandits take me with them and see what they can do to me or I was quick enough to see danger coming and able to run back to my people.

Now I try to not run off anymore. But it also gets harder for me to not do so. As we travel we meet others, people who I never heard of. That makes them interesting.

After years of traveling we never settled somewhere. Either places had already people living there, some nice to us, some we rather stayed away from, other places would make a hard living for people who just recently learned how to hunt and fish and have mostly been farmers before. Farmers who now had no seeds or animals.

We came from a remote place at the end of the world. We had no allies. Furthermore, we had no relationships to other people. We spoke a foreign language to them, as they to us.

I wanted to get to know them. Now that I knew there were others beyond our town, there must be another life for me somewhere. I did not want to become a farmer. I saw their importance. They feed the others, but I just could not stand the same routine each day.

Especially now I noticed that this was extremely hard for me. We woke up at the same time each day, started to wander on the search of food on one day, to change places the next. We stopped as the sun touched the horizon, cooked and prepared food for the next morning and went to sleep.

That is why I wanted to wander of. Find people that understand my desires better and maybe be able to help my people to find a place to call home.