The sharp, dark waves crashed onto the rocky shore of a small island. The jagged stones that made up the coast stuck out of the ocean like an unorganized set of teeth shooting in all directions. A cold gust swept in and pushed the tall trees to and fro; moving them at the whim of the wind. The sky was grey as clouds completely surrounded the shore and blocked out the sun and its magnificent rays. The waves continued to smack up against the black stone shore when a man walked out to the oceanfront.
He was a small, old man wearing nothing but a loincloth and a bow strung across his body at his left shoulder. On his back was a quiver of crude arrows that were carved from the same black stones that created the island’s shoreline. The man was of a slight build. He was not particularly imposing as his olive skin and dark black hair continued to get rained on. He gazed out into the choppy waters before him, unfazed by the downpour of rain from the sky. He concentrated on the waves as they rose and crashed in a cycle that seemed to go on forever and ever. There was something peaceful about it all. To see a wave rally itself to an intimidating height and then disperse into the waters around it as if it had never existed in the first place. But yet that wave was always still a part of that ocean; though the definition of what was the wave was, was never clear.
The man turned his gaze back to the island with the rocky shoreline. He had lived there for as long as he could remember. His parents said the same thing to him when he inquired about their arrival on the island. And his grandparents told his parents the same thing a generation before. The island wasn’t so different from the waves, he thought to himself. People come and go. They disappear, but their essence always remains. There is something that always endures and rises in the next wave. Something simultaneously transient and eternal. The man smiled at this thought as he heard his wife call him in for dinner. He turned his back to the edge of the earth and walked home.