What if you have believed
the same lie your whole life?
Not because it was true,
but because it arrived before
you knew how to question it.
Perhaps someone placed it inside you
when you were still learning
the names of things—
love,
leaving,
silence—
and you mistook their absence
for a definition of yourself.
Years passed.
You built a home around the lie.
Give it a chair at your table.
Asked its permission before loving.
Consulted it before dreaming.
And every time someone walked away,
it whispered:
See?
Mehameha.
Alone beneath a sky
too wide to answer.
Alone beside an ocean
that carried every voice away
before you could ask it to remain.
You thought the water understood
because it, too, was always leaving.
But perhaps the shore never begged it to stay
because the shore already knew:
departure is not always abandonment,
distance is not the end of love,
and emptiness is not proof
that nothing belongs there.
Tonight the sand
holds the warmth of a sun
no longer visible.
The ocean touches your feet
and withdraws.
Touches
and withdraws.
And suddenly you understand
how something can leave
without rejecting you.
How something can be absent
and still return.
How you can be alone
without being unloved.
The lie begins to loosen.
Not all at once.
Only one grain at a time,
carried out by the water
that once seemed to confirm it.
Mehameha.
You say the word again.
But now it does not mean
what it meant before.
Now it is the sacred silence
between who you were told you were
and who you are beginning
to remember.
The ocean comes back.
And this time,
you do not ask it to take away
your loneliness.
You ask it to take away
the lie.
— Malwina Buldys
