Asylum by the Sea

—for the one I could not keep

The sea sings to me beneath pale skies,

each wave a whispering psalm of forgetting.

I sit in an all-white room,

washed in sterile light,

its windows flung open like wounds,

overlooking the eternal hush of the ocean.

The salt air wraps around me like an old memory,

one too soft to hold,

yet too sharp to forget.

And in its cadence,

I find the quiet unknowing—

that there was once a world where you met me.

A world where your eyes could still find mine,

and I—

still believed in the possibility of being seen.

Oh, my love,

what could I have done to anchor you?

What incantation, what sacrifice,

could have made you stay?

Now, I must make peace

with knowing you only as a stranger

who once called me home.

The colors bleed from my world,

leaving only shades of mourning—

muted pastels of once-was

and might-have-been.

Perhaps I was foolish

to believe happiness was mine to claim.

Perhaps I was always meant

to ache more than I could ever love.

If I could be reborn—

a different girl in a different skin,

would you have stayed?

Would you have loved me then,

if I had been someone else—

someone better?

These thoughts echo in the hollow of my chest,

as the sea churns below,

inviting me to vanish,

to fold into its womb of oblivion.

And if I drowned—

would you feel it?

Would your heart shiver

as mine dissolved beneath the tide?

But no—

the ocean only listens.

It does not promise salvation,

only silence.

So I sit in this asylum by the sea,

a ghost wrapped in white,

listening to the world forget me,

while the waves

carry your name

back to the stars.

© 2025 Inaba Tarek