A small amusement park glowed behind me, and ahead there was only an empty sea.
Not one of those postcard beaches, crowded with colorful umbrellas and music turned all the way up. A small, nearly forgotten seaside town, with the beach club already closed for the night and its deck chairs lined up like soldiers waiting for an order that would not come again—at least not today.
I walked there alone that evening. I cannot even remember why I had gone out—perhaps only to be somewhere other than inside my own head, though as always happens, you carry your head with you anyway.
I kept wondering what the fuck any of it was for.
Not elegantly. Not with that slightly counterfeit calm some people use to discuss the “meaning of life” in front of a sunset, as though an orange sky automatically made their questions wiser. I was asking in anger.
What is the point, I wondered, of living through beautiful things if the ugly ones come along and sweep them away as though they were nothing? And more importantly: what the fuck are the ugly ones for? What lesson, exactly, am I supposed to learn? Who decided pain must teach us something instead of simply being a waste of time and breath?
A lifeguard boat lay stranded on the sand, SALVATAGGIO—RESCUE—written across it in large letters. Empty. Useless that night, like everything else.
I stopped and stared at it for quite a while. I thought there was nothing around to save that evening—only a flat sea, an empty boat, and an angry young man who needed to walk until his anger got tired before he did.
Farther on, a red flag snapped against its pole, warning of a danger the sea was not even showing that night. Calm, flat, almost bored by my anger.
The seagulls could not have cared less. They kept flying low over the water, doing whatever seagulls do, with no need to ask what it was for.
Perhaps that was when I began to understand something, though at the time I could never have put it into these words: asking “what is it for?” is already a trap. Pain is useless in precisely the same way a sunset is useless, or a seagull’s flight, or an amusement park glowing on a deserted beach. It simply happens. And you can choose whether to move through it with nothing but rage, or move through it while staying awake enough to notice the empty boat, the snapping flag, the seagulls that do not give a damn.
I solved nothing that night. I went home with the same anger I had left with, only a little more tired.
But I carried that deserted beach with me, that useless boat, that amusement-park light switching on behind all that silence.
And years later, looking at those photographs again, I understand that perhaps the right question was never “what is it for?” It was: who are you willing to become while you wait for it to pass?