The Sea Remembers

by Khudeeja Begum

The sea remembers what the sky forgets— a hush of stars drowned in salt and sorrow, each wave a whisper from a time before language learned to lie.

It cradles the bones of ships like lullabies, sings to the moon in a tongue of foam, and wears its grief in kelp and coral, a widow cloaked in blue.

I walked its edge, barefoot and bruised, where gulls wrote elegies in the wind, and the tide, like a patient thief, unstitched my silence stitch by stitch.

The sea is a cathedral of forgetting, its pews lined with driftwood saints, its hymns composed of thunder and longing, its altar — a horizon always out of reach.

I cast my name into its mouth and watched it dissolve like sugar, sweet and vanishing, a prayer too soft for echo.