the tide that spoke my name
“Found in a camera bag. Unsent, but not unloved.”
I asked the archivist for a letter today.
Sometimes I just want to hear from someone who remembered too much — someone whose words stayed behind.
He came back with one he’d found in a camera bag. There was sand between the pages, and the paper smelled faintly of salt, like it had been touched by the sea too many times.
“It wasn’t meant for anyone,” he said.
“But it looked lonely.”
He smiled and told me I could have it if I traded him one of my happiest-moment memories.
He always asks for those — he collects people like shells.
So I gave him the one where papa brought me a diary with a lock. It was very pink and sparkly and I was eight.
Now I’m sitting here, tracing the dried salt on the paper.
Somewhere between the folds, her voice begins to rise,
-soft at first, like the sound of waves before dawn.
_________________________________________
seasons passed, marked by photographs that aged,
but the beach didn’t change, nor my camera that waited.
the wind and the waves played a song,
and by the end of it, some wishes were long gone.
the salt in my tears, the salt in the waves —
i weighed them once; they were the same.
water is life, they say.
it heals.
but not when you’re drowning amidst laughing faces.
that’s when it feels monstrous,
heavier than tears.
not when you’re swallowed,
not when there's fear.
they say the tides call home those who are lost,
and one knew my name.
i didn’t write this to be heard, but to be found.
i will leave, carried with the wind and the waves.
---
I kept my hands on the letter and listened close.
The archivist once said that water holds memory —
and I think I can hear the distant screams of it.
A woman, painted in quiet chaos, stands on a rocky cliff above the sea.
She feels like a ghost, someone her parents forgot to name —
an unnamed witness to life.
She sways once, twice,
then surrenders herself to the water that remembers.
I hope she found whatever she lost.
The sea remembers. That’s enough.