The Salt on the Tongue

The taste of the sea is not just salt; it is the metallic tang of cold iron and the damp, heavy scent of wet stone. When I was a child, I would press my ear against the cool, rough surface of a harbor wall, listening to the water slap against the mossy concrete. It sounded like a rhythmic, wet heartbeat, a pulse that connected the deep, dark belly of the ocean to the dry, sun-baked earth of the shore. There is a specific ache in the chest that comes from watching a horizon line—a longing to dissolve into the blue, to let the current pull the tension from one’s shoulders until the body is nothing more than a buoy bobbing in the vast, indifferent cradle of the tide. We are all made of these currents, aren’t we? Held together by water and the memory of where the land finally decides to let go. What does it feel like to be suspended between the weight of the city and the infinite pull of the deep?

Ersavaş Güdül has captured this feeling in his beautiful image titled Bosphorus. It invites us to hover above the meeting point of two worlds, feeling the pull of the water from a distance. Does the view from above make you feel smaller, or more connected to the earth?