By Ryan Siddharth
DEC 21, 2024
Egress to the Homer Winslow.
Smell the cold briny air of the Atlantic ocean. Of this seaweed and silt, dried out crustaceans on the pebbled beach.
Walk through the Winslow Homer, and hear
the cascade of rocks moving under your foot with each and every step.
There's the Decline of British Sea Power
The smallest church In Sussex, or was is Saint-Saëns
and a Want To Be Free.
Down south along the Atlantic, to the marshes,
cicadas pass through their vibrations, occasionally
masked by the wind, rustling and rattling
through shades of green and yellow, and orange and brown. Punctuated and interspersed with the gas guzzling groans, roar, or hum of machinery passing by.
Over East, or was it West? My home across seas and seas, it's so entirely hard to explain how something can feel so foreign, alien. Existing as breathing in this atlantic salt.
My home across the seas matched with the smells of a deep clay chasm, humid air mixed in the particulates of warm seas,
mangrove swamps, and rotten leaves.
Watch where you step, and don’t wander too close to the waters edge there are creatures in there. They’ve wandered in from Sungei Buloh, mixing with the ash in the Kranji river, turned reservoir. But the heat is oppressive, and I want to go closer to
the water's edge, and I can feel
six million eyes upon me.
Back to the Winslow, to the Atlantic I have no eyes on me and god did I wish I did sometimes.
I can reach out and stretch and not yet touch the edges of my enclosure. Home was cramped,
the growing pains of shirts three sizes too small,
I could touch it's surface at a young age,
but god is this space too vast, and too empty.
Ryan Siddharth is a cybersecurity and economics major at Northeastern University.

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