To The Ocean's End, Gently.

On that fateful day, the earth shook in terror as the seas rose to take what none of them were ready to give. In a blink of an eye, it swallowed everything that stands in its path, letting that small strip of crust we call home to be one with the unreachable depths no man could reach.

Yet, a small handful of us are still here. In a pursuit to reach for other pieces of earth we could stand upon and live together, rebuilding everything that had slipped from our fingers.

We are the ones the water did not want, or perhaps simply forgot to finish. There is no shame in saying it plainly, we are what remains, nothing more, nothing less. And still, remaining is its own quiet defiance.

The horizon over there offers no promises. Only that faint, stubborn line where sky meets sea, where somewhere beyond it, a speck of land resides somewhere. We do not know if we sail toward salvation or further into the same hunger that took everything else. But a ship does not ask permission to move forward, and neither, it seems, do we.

So off we go, this small group of the spared, carrying nothing but each other, and the strange, aching duty of beginning again.