The Ocean Connects Us
Continuity without contact
In Antibes, the beach is made of smooth, rounded stones.
When the waves pull back, they clatter against one another, a sound you register more deeply than just your ears.
The air carries a faint salt wind from the Levant,
threaded with ghosts from Egypt,
sailors, merchants, wanderers,
each one folded into the same slow current of return.
On this edge of southern France,
the sea feels older than the map.
It speaks in borrowed languages,
Arabic, Greek, Provençal,
all softened by distance, all still understood.
I’m not the first to breathe this air,
or to be touched by this water.
The same wind that found them finds me.
The same salt settles on our skin.
We are connected in the simplest of ways,
by breath, by tide, by time itself.
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