December 2024

Love is a river, but time is an ocean.

The river cuts through stone, through boundaries, through demarcations. It carves curves that cradle the current. It moves with certainty, unyielding, quietly defiant. Step into it today and tomorrow, and it will never be the same water that touches your skin. It’s always new. Always becoming.

The ocean waits.

Vast and unending, it laps at the shore with ancient patience. What sinks is claimed. What’s returned is never the same. Time swirls in its depths, holding every storm, every wreck, every pearl.

Love reaches you like the river. A quiet arrival, a surge, a flood. It narrows, it widens, it finds a way. But time is not so kind.

You cannot wade into time. Time engulfs. Moments press down all at once, dissolving days into endless blue, blue, blue. What’s lost to the ocean of time stays lost.

Yet we try to carry love across it.

We place love in boats of memory and promises, rowing against the tide. Sometimes it survives. Often it does not. But on rare days, love’s little vessel makes it to shore, stained by sun and salt and air, but whole.

I’ve been the river. Restless and surging and so certain I’d arrive. I’ve swept others along, been swept in turn, felt love carve through me. But now, I’m learning to be the ocean.

The ocean doesn’t chase. It holds every storm, every shipwreck, every pearl hidden in its depths. It is enough. To be the ocean is to know nothing is truly lost. Only resting beneath the waves, waiting for the tide to shift.

So let love be a river. Wild and rushing, smoothing every jagged part of you. Let it carve paths where there were none, leaving behind something softer, something new. But don’t mistake the river for time. Love can’t fight the ocean. It can’t stop the boundless current. Much less tame it. The river will always flow, sure, but the ocean will always engulf.

And yet, love and time are not enemies. They belong to one another.

For love is a river, always becoming. And time is an ocean, vast and unyielding. What love carries, time holds. What time keeps, love remembers. And somewhere in the endless blue, the river meets the ocean.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be there too. Not fighting the tide. Not struggling to cross. Just floating. Letting the river that brought you here carry its memory, while you rest in the arms of the ocean, weightless and whole.