It starts early, the pull.
A childhood built around a river, not the sea, not yet, but a river wide enough to make a kid feel small in the best possible way. The kind of river with temples on its banks, long stone steps leading down to the water’s edge, and a vastness that made you wonder where it came from and where it was headed. Geography was never just a subject when you grew up next to moving water.
There were boat rides with family to the other side, picnics on the edge of the world as far as a child was concerned. And seva trips with your grandmother, where you handed out food with the seriousness of a tiny volunteer while secretly watching the river like it was the main attraction. The good deed was happening, yes, but the water had your full attention.
School outreach programs added their own chapter. Cleaning the banks, picking up litter, learning why this river was sacred long before any of you existed. You learned it with your lungs too, chanting Ganga Maiya Ki Jai until the words felt less like lessons and more like memories you were rediscovering.
The sea came later, in fragments. Movie scenes where the ocean behaved like a dramatic supporting actor, waves doing the absolute most. A coastal town here, a dolphin cameo there, and that one film where the water looked suspiciously calm right before absolutely not being calm at all. The water looked different on screen. Bigger. More cinematic. It stayed somewhere in the back of the mind, filed under things to feel someday.
Someday arrived when the city changed.
A bigger city, a stretch of promenade curving along the ocean, lit up at night like a string of lights dropped carelessly along the coastline. Queen’s Necklace, they called it, a name that did not exaggerate. Walking it, running it, sitting at the far end of another stretch closer to home, this became the rhythm of daily life. You could spend hours there without quite meaning to.
The sea was never the same twice. Some evenings it was rough and loud, high tide throwing itself at the rocks like it had a point to make. Some nights it was so calm you could hear your own thoughts clearly for the first time all day. Other people moved around you, wellness enthusiasts, dog walkers, vendors with snacks and balloons, the whole cheerful chaos of a city that never quite switches off. But somehow it never intruded. The water held its own quiet around you even in the middle of all of it.
Dawn brought one version of the sea, dusk brought another, and neither warned you which one was coming. Some evenings the water looked like someone had taken a giant brush dipped in turquoise and swept it across the horizon. Other days it sat grey and neutral, unbothered, like it had nothing to prove. And then there were the show off evenings, warm glowing oranges that make you stop mid step and just look. The colors changed but the sea never lost itself. It simply tried on different moods.
When it rained, the sound of drops hitting the waves made a rhythm that was not quite music but better than most playlists. The kind of sound you cannot Shazam.
Up on the hill, the statue of Mother Mary stood overlooking all of it, quiet and constant, an unofficial guardian with the best real estate in town. She did not demand anything but gave something nonetheless.
Some evenings you came alone. Other evenings you brought a few people, the lucky ones, the trustworthy ones. You would find your spot on the promenade, the lamppost throwing just enough light to see faces and no more, the ocean invisible beyond it but entirely there. You could hear it, feel it, sense the whole weight of it in the dark. And you would sit and share stories, small confessions, life’s big questions, sideways wisdom, easy banter, and laugh the way that only happens when the place is right and the people are right and nobody is performing for anyone.
The ocean did not need to be seen that night. It was enough that it was there.
And here is the thing about the ocean that no one really prepares you for. It makes you feel laughably small and quietly limitless at the same time. You look out at all that water going all the way to the horizon and think, I am a tiny, almost comic little speck in this. And then, two minutes later, you think, but I can do anything. Both feelings are true. The ocean lets them coexist without making a fuss about it.
It became a buddy. The most reliable one, honestly. Happy? Go to the water. Sad? Go to the water. Angry, inspired, lost, grateful, restless, needing to feel level headed again? Go to the water. It never cancelled. Never had opinions about which version of you showed up. Never offered advice you did not ask for. It just stayed there, wide and constant, and let you feel whatever you came to feel.
Even now, wherever there is water, something in the body responds before the mind catches up. A pond. A lake. A canal. A river glimpsed from a moving car. The ocean on a good day. The size does not matter. Something settles. Something that was slightly clenched lets go.
Funny? Maybe. Or maybe just true.
There is a concept called Blue Mind, the idea that being near water does something measurable and real to the human brain, calming it, opening it, bringing it home to itself. You did not need to read about it to know it. You have been living it since you were a child standing at the top of a long flight of stairs, looking out at a river that was going somewhere, and feeling, without quite having the words for it, that you were exactly where you were supposed to be.
The water was always the witness. It watched you grow up, get lost, find your footing, misplace it again. Some people have therapists. Some have journals. Some have long drives with the window down. I have the water. Have had it since before I knew that was what it was. And wherever I land next, the first thing I will look for, quietly, without making a big deal of it, is where the water is.
It held every mood you brought to its edge and gave nothing back except the one thing you actually needed.
Room to feel it.
Ajita’s Headspace was born from ruminations and memories finding their way out through storytelling.
The author is an artist and designer based in the tri-state area.
