In the soft hush between tides, where the sand remembers better than we do, I sat tonight—barefoot, still, watching the ghost of you walk the shoreline. You weren’t really there, of course. You haven’t been for years. But memory is a trickster with your mouth and your eyes.

The sea air still smells like that night in Vieques, when we ran into the water fully clothed, laughing like fugitives from a life that never fit us. You said love was a rebellion—something wild, something holy. I believed you. I believed everything you whispered beneath the thunder, like prayers we weren’t supposed to say out loud.

We made a promise in Puerto Rico once. Not the kind you make in front of family, or under god, or signed in gold on some courthouse paper. No—we made the kind carved into ribs, the kind even fire can’t unmake. You said, “Even if we lose each other, don’t lose *this*.”
This… being *us*. The version of us that danced in hurricanes and kissed with the ache of people who knew goodbye was always watching.

But baby—goodbye didn’t just watch.
It moved in. It unpacked its suitcase in the silence between our sentences.
It ate dinner with us, wore your sweaters, touched my back in the middle of the night and called it love.

And now here I am, writing to a ghost on the edge of the Atlantic, hoping the wind carries this to wherever your heart went when it stopped looking at me like home.

I still dream of you—
barefoot, sunburned, salt on your lips, eyes full of wild horses.
You were never meant to stay still.
And I loved you anyway.

That’s the part no one talks about—how loving someone doesn’t always mean holding them. Sometimes it means letting the waves take them, even when the water steals your own name in the process.

So if you’re out there tonight—
If you’re under the same sky,
if your heart still remembers that night in the rain,
know this:

I never stopped carrying you.
Even when it hurt.
Even now.

Even still.