The Weight of Crossing

There is a specific silence that belongs to a ferry terminal, the kind that settles in the marrow when you realize you are leaving a version of yourself on the shore. It is not the departure itself that haunts, but the sudden, sharp awareness of the space you no longer occupy. I remember the worn wooden bench at the edge of the pier where my father used to wait, his coat smelling of damp wool and tobacco, his hands always busy with a folded newspaper. That bench is still there, but the man who occupied it is not, and the space he left behind has a gravity all its own. We spend our lives moving across water, convinced we are going somewhere, when perhaps we are only ever moving away from the people we were when we stood on solid ground. We are all just passengers in transit, carrying the ghosts of our own histories across the divide. If you look closely at the water, do you see the reflection of where you are going, or the shadow of what you have already lost?

Shariful Alam has captured this weight in his beautiful image titled A Journey by Boat. He reminds us that every transit is a collection of stories held in suspension between two banks. Does this image make you feel the pull of the shore you left behind?