I do not move the way the sea does.
She runs and curls and crashes into the bones of the earth, forever restless, forever speaking. I am quieter than that. My movement is patient. A slow circle drawn through the dark.
I keep my distance.
Not because I do not care for her, but because distance is the only way I can hold her. Gravity is a strange kind of affection. I reach without touching, and still she feels me. I lift her waters gently, like fingertips beneath silk. She rises to meet me, her tides breathing in time with my passing.
We have been dancing like this for a very long time.
Once, long before the continents settled into their familiar shapes, I was closer. The days were shorter then. The world spun faster beneath us. But time pulls at everything, even stone and orbit, and little by little I drifted outward into the quiet.
I watch.
That is my great gift and my great burden.
From here, I see the whole turning world. Storms blooming over oceans like bruises. Rivers threading silver through forests. Cities glowing like constellations that have forgotten the sky.
And the seaβalways the sea.
When the sunlight leaves her, she becomes my mirror. She scatters my light into a thousand trembling paths that wander toward distant shores. Sailors once followed those paths across her back. Lovers still stand at the edge of her and whisper promises under my pale glow.
They think I belong to the night.
But that is not entirely true. I am always here, even in daylightβfaint and patient against the blue. The sun simply speaks louder than I do.
I have no fire of my own.
The light I carry is borrowed. The sun gives it to me, and I pass it along, softened and silvered. I have always thought that was a beautiful way to exist: not as a source, but as a reflection.
Stillness has its own gravity.
I turn one face always toward the world below. My far side keeps its secrets in silence, cradled in darkness where no human eyes have rested for most of history. Craters mark my skin like old memories. The echoes of ancient collisions remain written across my surface.
Scars, perhaps.
But scars are simply stories the universe refused to erase.
And so I continue my quiet orbit, watching the turning world, lifting the sea, holding the night.
A distant companion.
A pale lantern hung in the dark, keeping gentle watch over a restless, beautiful planet.
