When i was young, I used to go to the mouth of the river.
I had built myself a shack of dry branches, palm leaves and jute sacks to escape from reality.
I used to gaze in envy at the pink flamingos dancing between the bland certainties of fresh water and the greedy unknowns of the saltiness, at the greedy hippos who for fear of everything would never venture out and attack anyone who invaded their supposed territory, adapting to a muddy life with no future.
I was lost in the distant horizon of the ocean and thought that beyond that line there was a fantastic place, which had to be the opposite of ours.
A place where they had fixed things, where poverty didn't exist, where your father or older brother only beat you for a very good reason, where if you couldn't find work and you deserved it, someone would help you look for it.
A place that, to find it, you had to have courage, it was not enough to arrive at the mouth of the river like a dead fish, sailing with the current.
So I took the sea, not knowing that it would take me.
I took it as a faith, a hope, a train.
But the ocean does not want to be a dream, an ideal.
It wants to be the greatest mind you have ever known, the most generous deity but also the most powerful one, who can be malicious and unjust. 
It wants to be like life.
So for thirty years I left one father and found another, who at least fed me every day and whom I could talk to in the evening. 
Without a family, other than dumb fish, with women passing through the few island ports and two daughters who knew so little about their father that they were ashamed.
I drank litres of water and salt, risked being swallowed by the waves several times, gave skin flaps to voracious fish. But I did not find that right place behind the horizon.
So I returned home.
I found myself old in a different world and fast, too fast for my eyes and mind.
Who knows, maybe also for the great mind of the sea.
The river was full of those dead fish that run towards nothing, because they already know that beyond the horizon there is nothing special. Nothing more interesting than what they can see from those little contraptions they hold in their hands.
"I'm old, but I'm not a dead fish," I thought.
So I set off again, following the river upstream, like a fish that still wants to dart, to know, to be surprised. 
I will arrive in known lands, perhaps even more contaminated than these, and without my friend the ocean. 
But by now I have realised that life is in the journey, not the destination. 
I have realised that the right world beyond the horizon is within you.