There are mornings I wake up
with the whole sea humming inside my chest
not drowning, not swimming — just
carrying it, like a secret too vast to confess.
The salt sits heavy behind my eyes.
I blink, and it rains.

There are nights I lie still and
feel nothing but wind in my bones.
Not silence, not peace ,
just absence stretched so thin, it whistles.
Like a conch left hollow by time,
still echoing a sound it barely remembers.

I am a shore that forgets its own shape.
The tide smooths me down, pulls away,
returns again with a different name.
It gives and takes and gives and takes
until I no longer know
if I am full or empty, or if those are just
two ways of describing the same ache.

I smile like a person who knows
they are not what they used to be —
and maybe never were.
Some days, I am the entire horizon,
wide and unreachable.
Others, I am a single grain of sand
stuck beneath someone else’s heel.

Even in stillness, something is shifting.
Even in silence, I am screaming inside.
And no one hears it but the waves,
who’ve heard it all before
and choose to return anyway.

I am learning that being full
does not always mean being whole.
That emptiness can feel like
a kind of sacred space —
not lack, but preparation.
Not brokenness, but room
for something yet unnamed.

So let the ocean come.
Let it swallow me or spare me.
Let it kiss my ankles and leave.
Let me hold both the flood and the drought
as if they are mine to cradle.

Because they are.

Because I am not just the shore.
I am the tide too.