A Promise Beyond Time

We met once

when the sky was lower

and the sea was not so cruel.

You wore the cold in your shoulders,

the wind in your voice,

and I...

I was dust from a dozen nations,

salt from seven mothers,

flame-stitched and unbroken.

You looked at me

like the land itself had called you.

And maybe it did.

They say we parted..

that time split us

like driftwood

on the tide of our duties.

But time cannot sever

what the land remembers.

You walked back to your hills.

I walked into the belly

of another world..

one made of rivers wide as memory

and forests thick with breath.

Turtle Island, they call it.

Where stones are different,

but no less sacred.

Where the wind carries languages

older than paper.

I planted my feet there

deep in soil that sang to my bones.

And though the stars turned strange

and the birds called differently,

I knew you would find me.

Because we were carved

from the same reckoning.

One day, you will arrive.

Maybe not as you were.

Maybe not as I am.

But you will come

with hands that remember how to hold,

and eyes that still carry

that hillborn silence.

You’ll step into my life

like you were never gone.

Like the sea was just a pause

between pages.

And I...

I will not ask where you’ve been.

Because I will already know.

We will sit

on red clay earth,

beneath sky that listens.

We will speak without needing sound

just shared breath,

just the pulse of things that waited with us.

Maybe it will be near riverstone,

or in the hush of pine,

where strawberries grow wild

and cedar leans in to bless the moment.

And when you touch my hand,

you will feel it:

the pull of every life we’ve lived

to arrive here.

On land that calls both of us now.

You’ll smile..

not because you’re surprised,

but because you always knew

the road was long

but not lost.

I will press my forehead to yours

and whisper the words

that none of our ancestors were allowed to say aloud:

“I found you.

And I never stopped waiting.”