I am older than the maps that try to hold me.
They give me namesβAtlantic, Pacific, Indianβas if the lines between continents could divide what I am. But beneath their borders I move as one body, a slow breathing creature wrapped around the world.
I feel the moon the way lungs feel air.
Every night her gravity pulls at my skin, lifting my tides into long, patient swells. Shores inhale me; shores release me. Sand remembers the rhythm of my arrival. Cliffs feel the steady tapping of my persistence, century after century, until stone forgets it was ever strong.
Wind is my closest companion.
When it runs across my back, I shiver into waves. Some are gentle, folding themselves softly onto beaches. Others grow tall and restless, rearing up like dark horses before breaking into white laughter. Ships ride these moods, tiny insects crawling across my surface, believing they understand me because they can cross me.
They do not know how deep I am.
Below the glitter of sunlight, I become colder, quieter. Light dissolves into blue, then indigo, then a darkness so complete it feels like sleep. Down there, mountains rise taller than any on land, and creatures drift with lanterns glowing from their bodies like slow, wandering stars.
Sometimes the earth beneath me trembles.
Then I remember the violence that shaped me. My calm skin gathers into towering walls of water, racing toward distant coasts. Cities hear me before they see me: a roar, a sudden absence of shorebirds, the impossible weight of my approach.
But most days, I am simply moving.
Currents coil through me like long thoughts. Warm water travels north, cold water sinks and returns south again, a circulation older than memory. Whales pass through my vastness like wandering kings. Coral builds quiet kingdoms beneath my waves.
And above, the sky changes endlessly.
Storms bruise it purple and grey; sunlight scatters diamonds across my skin. At night, the stars fall into me and shatter into trembling reflections. I hold their broken light for a moment before the next wave erases it.
People stand at my edge and listen.
They hear my surf and think it is noise, but it is only my voice repeating the same sentence I have spoken since the first shore cooled enough to touch me:
I am here.
I am moving.
I will never be still.
