Entropy

The sea has always known something I have not.

It understands how one body can belong to two shores at once, how the tide can spend its whole life leaving without ever learning how to let go.

When I think of home, I do not first remember walls or windows. I remember the room where we grew beside one another, your sleep braided with mine, your voice finding only a handful of words, yet always somehow finding my name.

Perhaps every life is given its first language. Mine was the quiet grammar of your eyes, the patient cartography of your laughter, the weather of your silences or screams, the thousand tiny constellations our family learned to navigate (“does this movie have a car chase?”) so instinctively that love became indistinguishable from remembering.

I did not know then that one day I would cross an ocean to spend my life asking what makes a mind, while the first mind that ever undid me would remain forever beyond every theory I could know, imagine, build, or test.

Sometimes I think my life’s work will be only a meandering river— one trying to come back to you.

Now there is another shoreline. Your days unfold in unfamiliar rooms, where strangers find you wanting, where they question, challenge, relent, and sometimes insult your sanctity, where some can only deign to see, what maa, papa, and I have known in our bones for decades: That you are a map, if only someone loves you enough to read it.

I wonder who notices the almost invisible things Who knows the precise cadence of your laughter, who can hear the difference between your waiting and your worry, who knows that one small change in your space or routine can feel like an earthquake beneath your feet.

These are the thoughts that arrive at night, crossing the ocean much faster than I ever could.

Meanwhile maa papa continue to stand where land gives itself over to water. I imagine them becoming slowly, imperceptibly, like cliffs: still bearing the waves, still refusing to yield, though every tide carries away something too small for anyone else to notice.

I fear the future the way sailors once feared the edge of the map— not because I believe the world ends there, but because I know there are depths for which no compass has ever been made.

And oh for me, guilt is a strange sea.

It does not rage. It rises quietly around ordinary moments: a presentation well given, a paper accepted, a beautiful evening with loved ones close by, the brief, almost shameful happiness of forgetting for an hour how far away the people I love most have become.

I have often wondered whether my loneliness began with you.

Now I think loneliness is simply the shape love takes when it has nowhere to arrive.

You are my abyss, not because you have ever pulled me under, but because every attempt to measure your depth has only taught me how immeasurable a human soul, and my love for one, can be.

Whatever tenderness lives in me was carved there slowly, by you, by maa, by papa, like the sea hollowing stone— not through violence, but through endless, unconditional, return.

So I keep crossing water.

The distance teaches me nothing except that love obeys no geography.