It was not a reflection but a recognition.
Not of shape, but of origin.
She did not look into the water. The water looked into her.
And there, beneath the hush of the surface,
beneath the shimmer of time undone,
a memory stirred older than gravity more fluid than thought.
She had not yet wept, yet the tide trembled.
Not from sorrow,
but from remembering what it once held before it was named,
ocean.
Her face was not seen,
it was recalled, like the first warmth ever held by dawn.
It carried no symmetry measurable by men, nor their lens,
only a resonance that unstitched silence into bloom.
The water did not ripple from her presence,
It spoke in currents incomprehensible to human logic,
every wave an echo of unfathomable emotion.
It had missed her.
The way salt misses sweetness.
The way vastness misses its single,
tucked-away center.
Even the waves slowed,
as if afraid to misplace her outline again.
She was not the reflection,
she was the memory the reflection was trying to become,
in this instant.
.
.
And the sea,
the sea kept her secret.
But only just.