The Tidal Year

Freya had her tidal year - a year, following her brother's death, during which she compromised to swimming in every tidal pool in England, along with her friend Miri. I know that we always find a bit of ourselves in everything we read; that the things others feel are always mirrors of what we, too, had felt at some point. So, I was aware, naturally, that while I hadn't, thank god, lost someone as intrinsically close as a brother, and had never swam in a tidal pool, the book was going to resonate with me. I just didn't know to which extent. Sure everyone has a tidal year – one of those when we feel like drowning and suffocating at the same time, when we are overcome by grief and sadness for whatever we've lost, and days last forever, grim and thick. I saw my 2024, somehow, in Freya's year, and, with that, I felt we also left the water together at the end.