I don't know if this really counts as a confession, not in the usual sense of, like, a secret sin or anything. Maybe it’s more… a quiet ache. A kind of pre-grief, I suppose. I don't know if anyone else has ever felt something like that before, this profound sense of loss for something that hasn't quite happened yet but is, you know, absolutely inevitable. I’m 79 now, I think. Hard to keep track sometimes. I live in a small fishing village, always have. My grandfather was a fisherman, my father was, and I was too, before my hands started giving out. There's a particular kind of light here in the mornings, just as the sun breaks over the horizon, painting the sky in these incredible pinks and oranges that reflect off the water. It’s a painter’s dream, really. I used to sketch it every day, tried to capture that ephemeral quality. Never quite managed it, I don't think. It's too grand, too fleeting for mere pencil and paper. I always felt a kind of… failure, I guess, that I couldn't translate the immensity of it onto a canvas. My wife, bless her, used to say I was too hard on myself. She always saw the beauty in my attempts, even the ones I deemed inadequate. But now, when I watch that sunrise, when I see the tide come in, it’s different. It’s not just beauty anymore. There's this… creeping dread. I've lived here my whole life, watched the ocean do its thing. But these past, oh, twenty years? Maybe more. It’s higher. Every year it pushes a little further. The salt marsh is disappearing. The beach where my kids used to build sandcastles? It’s half gone. The old wooden pilings near the cannery, the ones my dad helped put in, they're submerged almost all the time now. It’s not just the big storms, you know, the ones that make the news. It’s the everyday high tide. It just… keeps coming closer. I remember my grandson, Leo, he's a marine biologist now, very smart. He came home about ten years ago, full of facts and figures. He sat me down in the kitchen, coffee steaming in our mugs, and he showed me graphs on his laptop. Sea level rise. Thermal expansion. Glacial melt. All these words. He said, "Grandpa, this isn't going to stop. Not for a very long time. This village… it’s going to be underwater." I just looked at him. I think I asked him if he wanted another biscuit. It felt… too big to take in, too clinical. It was like he was describing a diagnosis, a terminal one, for the very ground beneath our feet. A kind of geographical prognosis, I guess you could call it. My neighbors, they see it too. We don’t talk about it much, not directly. It’s like a collective psychological defense mechanism, maybe, to avoid the painful reality. We talk about the bad fishing seasons, the erosion on the docks, the cost of flood insurance that keeps going up and up. We talk about how Mrs. Henderson had to lift her house three feet last year. But nobody says the words, you know? "We're going to have to leave." Or, "Our homes are going to be swallowed." It’s too much. It feels like admitting defeat. Like admitting that everything we've built, everything our ancestors built, is just… temporary. I walk the shoreline sometimes, even in the cold. I look at the foundations of the old lighthouse, how the waves crash against them now, eroding the stone. I think about the stories my great-grandfather told, about the storms of his youth, how they seemed so monumental then. And now… it's not a storm. It’s just… the world changing. And we, all of us here, we're just… standing in its path. It feels like a slowly unfolding tragedy, like watching a painting slowly fade and crumble before your eyes, knowing you can’t do a thing to stop it. I wonder where we'll go. Where will the essence of this place go? The smell of salt and pine, the sound of the gulls, the way the light hits the water at dawn. You can move the people, but you can’t move the soul of a place, can you? Not really. It’s embedded in the very earth, in the way the wind whistles through the eaves, in the taste of the fresh-caught cod. It feels like a kind of environmental bereavement. I don't know if that's a real term, but it feels right. Sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and the moon is full, I hear the waves. And it’s not comforting anymore. It’s a reminder. A slow, steady drumbeat of inevitability. I just… I don't know what to do with it. This sadness. This certainty. This quiet, persistent grief for a home that is still here, but is already, in some fundamental way, gone.