The absence you wore was never emptiness,
but the vessel being carved, a chamber held
by the ocean's vast, indifferent design.
That memory, un-dried, not a tear,
but the essence of all that is kin,
the sacred deposit of Creation in our veins.

We are not cracked mirrors, but two coasts
of an unbound, submerged land,
reflecting the same furious surface.
The years that tremble are the tide's slow turn,
dissolved now, like whisper on wave-crest.

You reach for the echo, sorrow,
but there is no ghost in this homecoming.
The child was not spared the sea,
only kept from crushing depths.
The current beneath was not a phantom me,
but the pulsing symphony of fate.

Do not kneel before the name the sands wrote
stand, and claim the joining.

For the final lullaby is not of leaving, but return,
a covenant sealed not with paper, but with brine.
We are now the whole, soaring roar,
the immutable fusion of
blood and salt,
claimed by the tides, at last.

Penned by my hand on the 2nd of Phaestian, in the year 987 AF.