I knew the Ocean.
I rode the waves, I explored the caves, yet I stood unfazed.
Once my nemeses, now my companions. Nightmares then turned familiars. I was closer to Atlantis than I was to the coastal city.
I knew them far too well. All had stories to tell.
It's not a matter of "tricks" and "spells" to fascinate you with my Self, because the Ocean is far too deep for ingenuity to hide and repel.
The gales push me past estuaries—boundaries I grew apart from, and quandaries I was ready to face.
They held paths and destinations. No matter where I looked, the vague Blue tints were always present.
However, I've always loved it when the Sun's orange meets the Ocean's turquoise.
We can call them opposites, but they look so beautiful together.
They dance in a dance they only know, and speak in a language they keep alive.
It is beauty. It is a painting of the sky we dedicated our hopes to.
Somewhere in the Ocean, the water is so still that it feels like nothing.
I wrote this poem, numb and empty. Like a blank sheet of paper, I try to fill myself with words I lost.
Wet pages, smudged ink, and softer fingers.
No chords to play, no strings to strum. I no longer hear the Ocean's call from the conch's shell.
My ink-stained hands lost their grip on the Ocean's turquoise fingers.
Those fingers mine would intertwine with when moonlight falls and twilight calls.
They flow and prance forever 'til I can't catch up, and I used to catch up.
Now, it overflows to directions I cannot see. They root from depths I do not know, and they move anywhere but past me.
I want to feel it ripple, I want to see it struggle, I want to see it hoping, but what was perhaps left was just a plain body of water, undiscovered and unseen from the World's eyes.
Deep words I buried in the Ocean's depths. Anecdotes left flying with unfamiliar paper planes.
I watched it all slip away from my fingers.
I try to choke the salty aftertaste of screaming and gasping for desperate help, but there was nothing to run away from.
I try to dive, but I end up drowning. The Ocean has become too deep, too silent, and too unfamiliar for me to bother knowing.
It feels as though my feet are slow when the rush hour drags my very being to the south while lost bottles deliver letters to the end of the north.
Clarity and Comprehension are nomads. They come and go as I meet newer waves.
They fly with the wind, and it's been too long since I've last got a glimpse of them.
The push and pull grow stronger, and the air I breathe suffocates me to my drowning. Or was there air?
Nevertheless, the Void lures me to its lair. Azure skies terrified me, but living there, exposed to the Void's own sky—an abyss filled with lies and trapped with cries, byes, and ties I lost hold of—I find myself consumed with regrets of everything that could have been if I painted those skies with the hues I wanted.
Never mind the varying shades and tints, because even so, a part of me would have still been there, existing somewhere in the vastness we could have owned.
Had I known I'd regret that period of my life for the rest of my days, I would've grabbed my brushes, rode the waves, and felt the salty breezes on my skin until I was left breathless.
Despite all of my knowledge, I thought I knew the Ocean.
I never knew I needed the skies as much,
for the Ocean needs its light and stars for seafarers to navigate.
I never knew I needed the winds as much,
for they are the reason the waves we ride brought us to places.
Without the skies that brought out my brightest and darkest colors, and the winds that shared my moments and whispered my stories,
I am left alone with nothing—consumed by the waves.
finally out of the vaulttt