Like many say, we journey forever: homeland shrinking, foreign soil rising. If you meet me in that airport glare, buying duty-free whiskey, it isn't me. I am knuckle-deep in the silt-cold stream behind grandmother's house, turning river-smooth stones—each one an axiom, slick and heavy. All I find are only blind crabs, scuttling sideways, too small to launch an assault on our notions of good and evil.

Not my hand parting the damp, spiderwebbed mist at dawn. Not my back bearing the sun's searing coin at noon. Not my voice driving crows, black scraps against the furnace sky, at dusk. Not my shadow humming with cicadas on the tin roof at night.

Like-me-not-me.

I entrust my facets to an oxhide: sometimes I wear it, armed to the teeth, none knowing my heart; sometimes I strip bare, releasing soul and spirit, begging them to return home in my stead. The ladder of clouds we climb ascends so slowly— talk of homecoming is still premature. Remember our hopes when we left home? Urgent as fire melting glaciers. Like our first gasp after breaking the amniotic tide.

Tell me how to land on that sea after the gulls retreat. None have ever truly arrived—save the Nautilus’s ancient echo, or Borges’s future gaze. Poseidon’s trident can split an ocean but never win a reef’s forgiveness; the sea’s daughters shift between woman and fish, trying to wake ethics, while shattered islands sheathe their scales, drifting toward union. After nearing the storm’s core, we retreat blankly to the eye’s edge, watching helpless things seep into Klein-blue.

Yes, we ferry no one. We offer one cry, then drown in the swell.

As me, the humanity’s precarious pawn, hammering uneven phrases to vault history’s chronicle—or fracture time. As whale, an icon of grand narratives, crossing longitude of sun and latitude of moon, daring only in the moment of descent to birth all things. When icebergs melt, a voice sighs: Human, slower—evolve slower. The death knell tolls; a blue star bleeds, debt-ridden.