The Ocean Is Not Quiet… We Just Don’t Always Listen

I came home with salt still on my skin and something I can’t quite name sitting with me.

For two weeks, life slowed down.

Morning didn’t rush me.
No schedule chasing me out the door.
Just light coming through the window
and the ocean, always there.

I swam every day.
In Indian Bay.
The kind of water that makes you forget what time it is.
The kind that holds you without asking anything in return.

It felt… good.
Simple in a way that makes you wonder what we’ve done to our lives back home.

And it’s beautiful there. It really is.

But there’s something else.

Because there were no fish.

Or almost none.
I kept waiting for that flicker of movement, that quick flash of colour.
But mostly it was just… quiet.

The reef didn’t feel alive.
It felt tired.
Like something that had been through too much and didn’t have the strength to show it anymore.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

Part of me wants to explain it.
To make sense of it quickly.

There’s no recycling.
Garbage gets burned or tossed aside.
Plastic shows up everywhere.
Animals wander in ways that feel hard to watch.

But even as I think those things, I know it’s not that simple.

Because the ocean doesn’t belong to one place.
Because the currents carry more than water.
Because the damage we’re seeing doesn’t start and stop on one island.

Places like Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are living within a story that’s much bigger than they are.

And still… what I saw is real.

I keep thinking about it now that I’m home.

Standing in my kitchen, where everything works.
Where water comes out exactly how I expect it to.
Where I sort my recycling and feel like I’ve done something.

And I don’t say that sarcastically.
I think we’re all just trying to do our part.

But it doesn’t feel like enough right now.

Not after seeing that ocean.

Not after feeling that kind of quiet.

I don’t have a plan.

I don’t even know what the right response is.

But I can feel something starting.

A kind of restlessness, maybe.
Or maybe it’s just attention.

A willingness to not move on too quickly.

To sit with what I saw.
To wonder about it a little longer than is comfortable.
To notice what I usually don’t.

Maybe it becomes something more.
Maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe it looks like going back someday.
Or maybe it just changes how I live here in ways no one else ever sees.

I don’t know yet.

But I do know this.

That ocean is still with me.
And it’s not as quiet as it first felt.

I think I’m just starting to hear it.

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