She was not followed...
she was mirrored by currents that remembered her shape before she knew she had
one.
No anchor, no tether, yet she was never drift.
The waters did not carry her. They held.
Not with grasp, but with gravity that only exists for what it cannot release.
She walked away from everything,
but never from the tide that breathed her name through every salt-stained hush.
It wasn’t rescue. It wasn’t return.
It was recognition from the liquid memory of a world that still wept in the rhythm of her once-forgotten sighs.
There were no splashes, no cries...
just the ache of an ocean that had been waiting to become her skin again.
Even when she tried to vanish into the hush between days,
even when her voice curled into silence and her form into blur...
The waters did not forget.
They whispered her edges into the moon’s ear,
sang her lullaby to the cliffs who once held her grief.
They knew her departures were not escape but ceremony.
They remembered that she had drowned not to die,
but to remember she was never breathless to begin with.
She was not saved. She was kept.
By something softer than salvation...
by the tenderness of tides that had no language but her.
And so the waters, those endless limbs of longing,
never let her go.
Not out of need. Not out of love.
But because they were her.
And she, the forgotten beginning of their swell.