What The Ocean Chose To Keep The ocean... First thing... people misunderstand about it... It simply takes... Simply selects... With patience that makes human intention look rather quaint by comparison... What it chose to keep... The ribcage of light descending through the surface... anatomically, deliberately... presiding over the ruin below with the quiet authority of something that has long since stopped needing to justify its presence... A body remembered in light alone... The flesh long dissolved... the bones translated into something the water found more interesting... More permanent... The veins still pulse.... Red... against the dead ground, crawling through the dark sediment with a vitality that has no business surviving down here... And yet.... Life that refuses the conditions assigned to it... The pages drift... Unmoored... unhurried... carrying words that the water has been working on for some time... and... not yet fully claimed.... It will... The ocean is patient in a way that manuscripts are not... But not yet... For now the words remain, suspended between preservation and erasure... Noone brave to descend far enough to read them.... The cathedrals stand... stone outlasts conviction. Built for eternity and eternity, it turns out, is wet and cold. Prayers once offered inside them... Memory... Memory outlasts its container... Knowledge survives the drowning.... Ocean... Cold... Deep... Without forgiveness...