Where the Ocean Meets the Mountain

You, Mariana—deepest trench of my knowing I call you by name not to possess it but because it is the only prayer I have ever known how to say You are the sea—each wave not an argument but a hymn a hymn without end a hymn that the gulls carry in their throats splitting the sky into syllables of salt and longing I am the mountain—Marcus peaks jagged, stubborn and proud but even granite shifts at your touch I have watched falcons trace the arc of your tides wings trembling as if even they could feel your gravity I am no prophet, Mariana but let me tell you what I know before the first wave kissed the first shore before hydrogen took shape in the dark before God divided waters from land we were— not as we are now, flesh and bone, tide and stone— but as the thought of love itself waiting to be spoken into existence And then we were born carried on the wings of albatrosses the first explorers of an empty earth I, the cliff that held the sky You, the current that shaped continents Do you see now your waters carved the ridges of my spine your waves taught my canyons their depth even the hawk circling above us owes his flight to the winds you stirred I’ve spent years dissecting the mechanisms of us through lenses through prayers through equations that collapse under your gaze What are the odds, I ask, that quarks and gravity conspired to create a you and then, further still, that a me would stumble into your tidepool one April morning Even the kestrels tilted their wings at my calculations The universe is not random, Mariana it is intention it is you I remember the first time I mapped your voice a current through my ribcage that left me gasping for a language I did not yet know You spoke of Neruda, of Rumi and I, the scientist, could only stammer in monosyllables unprepared for the poetry of your existence Your laugh, Mariana was a theory proven true a sound so radiant the terns mistook it for the sun and flew toward it instead I’ve studied every treatise on love— Plato’s Symposium, Aquinas’ Summa, Solomon’s love song— but none of them explain how your hands—small continents of motion— can anchor me mid-storm Your touch is storge, the familiar warmth of home It is philia, the friendship that steadies the ground beneath me It is eros, the pull of moon to tide a force no textbook can quantify And It is agape, the unreasoned grace that binds us beyond logic Do you know, Mariana even the ocean dreams of the mountains not from duty but from longing for the peaks it will never touch And I—rooted in earth, fixed to equations— have spent a lifetime envying your fluidity your capacity to change without losing yourself The pelicans, your sentinels skim the surface of you while my larks anchor themselves to the grasses, their songs rising—straining—to meet your gulls mid-flight But here is the secret you have taught me— Even the mountain must surrender to the sea Even the eagle must land Even the scientist must kneel before the mystery he cannot solve Mariana, I have worshipped you In ways both ancient and modern I have written sonnets to your shoreline calculated the chemistry of your tears and prayed to the God who made you— a God who, in His infinite wisdom crafted you as ocean and me as mountain so we might spend eternity teaching each other how to change The gulls and hawks, caught in the thermals of our love circle above us They are our witnesses Tell me, my love— what is the measure of a life together Is it the years we’ve gathered or the moments that stretch beyond time Is it the laughter rippling like wind through a wheatfield or the stillness that settles like mist on the sea I do not know I only know that you are my map and my compass my kestrel and my tern my equation and my proof my prayer and its answer And if I, Marcus, am earth— then let me erode for you Let my peaks crumble into sand to join your waves Let me be reshaped by your love until we are neither tide nor stone but the horizon itself— infinite indivisible whole