Writers 
Do not ask the ocean
why it never sleeps.
It has been awake
since the first lie
was told beneath the sun.
It remembers the king
who ordered a thousand deaths
and washed his hands
in water that could not forget.
It remembers the sailor
who promised his wife
he would return by winter.
His ship came home.
He did not.
It remembers the little girl
who threw a flower into the waves
and whispered her mother's name.
The flower disappeared.
The name did not.
Beneath its beautiful blue skin,
the ocean keeps an archive
no human hand can open.
There are letters
written by people
who never learned to read.
There are apologies
that arrived too late.
There are wedding rings
still holding the shape
of fingers long forgotten.
And there are names.
Millions of names.
Some were spoken with love.
Some were screamed in terror.
Some belonged to people
the world decided
were never important enough
to remember.
The ocean remembers them all.
Sometimes, at midnight,
it returns a shoe,
a photograph,
a broken piece of a door.
People call these things accidents.
The ocean calls them evidence.
And every evening,
when the sun lowers itself
into the distant horizon,
the water turns gold
as if nothing terrible
has ever happened there.
That is its oldest trick.
Beauty makes witnesses
doubt what they have seen.
I once asked the ocean
if it was cruel.
A wave climbed the shore
and covered my feet.
Then another came,
carrying a shell
with a hole through its heart.
The ocean whispered,
“I am neither kind nor cruel.
I am what remains
when everyone has finished
telling their version.”
I wanted to ask
what name it had saved for me.
But suddenly,
I was afraid of the answer.
So I walked away
before the tide returned.
Behind me,
the waves continued their work,
erasing my footprints
one by one.
Yet somewhere beneath the surface,
I imagined a new page
being opened.
And on it,
in handwriting older than time,
the ocean began to write.
Not my name.
Not yet.
Just one sentence:
“This one came asking questions.”
