Into the Ocean: The Tide Beneath Still Water

My mind was blown when the clock read six forty-seven.
I could feel you creeping into my thoughts,
calm as the ocean,
like waves lapping against the shore—
the threatening flood hidden beneath still water.

Into the Ocean lingered in my mind long before I ever wrote its first line.

After finishing the first three installments of The Seven Letters of Clara, I realized there was a thread quietly connecting the trilogy long before its seventh and final poem. The questions had always been there, waiting beneath the surface.

Why did I prolong the agony?

What was there left to think about?

Why did these memories insist on returning?

Those questions became the tide that eventually carried this poem into existence.

The Disturbance Before the Storm

The poem begins with a disturbance.

Not an external one.

An internal one.

A thought arrives unexpectedly and demands attention.

I was not searching for memory. It simply surfaced on its own.

The specificity of the time—six forty-seven—anchors the moment in something ordinary. There is nothing remarkable about the hour itself. Yet it becomes the doorway through which the entire poem unfolds.

I’ve always lived by the phrase:

“When the clock strikes seven, she writes again.”

But what happens before seven o’clock?

Before the words reach the page, they exist only as quiet thoughts.

This poem begins in that fragile space—between feeling and language.

“I Could Feel You Creeping Into My Thoughts”

This line introduces the poem’s central tension.

The person being addressed does not return through conversation or physical presence.

They return through memory.

The word “creeping” is intentional.

It suggests something gradual.

Not force.

Not violence.

Not even intention.

Only quiet intrusion.

By the time the writer recognizes the memory, it has already begun occupying space.

I think memory behaves this way more often than we realize.

Rarely do we choose when someone returns to our thoughts.

Sometimes a familiar face appears without warning.

A sentence resurfaces.

A small detail reawakens an entire season of our lives.

Someone who has been absent for months—or years—suddenly feels impossibly close again.

The Ocean Before the Storm

calm as the ocean,
like waves lapping against the shore—
the threatening flood hidden beneath still water.

At first glance, the ocean appears peaceful.

Predictable.

Beautiful.

Safe.

Gentle waves.

Still water.

A shoreline undisturbed.

Yet beneath that calmness, the poem quietly introduces contradiction.

The flood already exists.

The danger has not arrived.

It has simply remained hidden.

This became one of the poem’s foundational images because the ocean embodies emotional complexity so naturally.

What appears calm from a distance often conceals unimaginable depth beneath its surface.

The same can be said of people.

The same can be said of grief.

The same can be said of memory.

Sometimes our strongest emotions arrive disguised as composure.

Sometimes the feelings we conceal most carefully are the ones shaping us most deeply.

The Thought Behind the Ocean

When I wrote these opening lines, I found myself thinking about emotional restraint.

I’ve always been fascinated by how people carry entire inner worlds without anyone noticing.

How someone can smile while carrying grief.

How another can appear composed while quietly navigating confusion.

How longing can survive beneath ordinary routines.

The ocean became the perfect metaphor because it allows opposing truths to exist together.

Calmness and danger.

Beauty and destruction.

Silence and force.

Perhaps that is what many of us become over time.

Still water.

We learn to function.

We learn to smile.

We learn to keep moving.

Yet beneath the surface, our emotions never stop shifting.

They wait.

They gather.

And sometimes all it takes is a single thought for the tide to begin rising again.

The Beginning of Projection

Only after finishing the poem did I realize the ocean was never describing emotion alone.

It was describing identity.

At first, I believed I was writing about someone else.

Someone who had returned to my thoughts.

Someone who seemed responsible for unsettling my peace.

But looking back, I noticed something I hadn’t understood while writing.

The ocean appears before that person truly does.

The flood exists before the investigation begins.

The emotional landscape belongs to the speaker long before another person enters the poem.

The memory may have triggered reflection.

But the depth was already there.

The ocean had been waiting long before they arrived.

When Memory Feels Like a Tide

One of life’s strangest experiences is realizing that certain people continue affecting us long after their place in our lives has changed.

Not because we still talk to each other.

Not because we remain close.

But because they became attached to something unresolved within us.

A memory.

A question.

A wound.

A possibility.

Sometimes we mistake the return of those emotions as evidence that we miss the person.

Sometimes what we are really encountering is ourselves.

The ocean does not rise because of the moon alone.

The tide was always there.

The moon simply revealed it.

Perhaps people work the same way.

They do not always create our emotions.

Sometimes they uncover the ones we have carried all along.

That realization became unexpectedly freeing.

It reminded me that every person who enters our lives leaves something behind.

A memory.

A lesson.

A wound.

A kindness.

An indelible mark.

And perhaps we leave something behind in them, too.

When I think about the ocean now—even when I think about Sunny—I no longer think only of absence.

I think about connection.

Every letter.

Every memory.

Every conversation.

Every silence.

Together, they became part of the person I am still becoming.

The Beginning Before the Beginning

This opening exists before the conflict fully unfolds.

Before the accusations.

Before the questions.

Before the investigation.

It captures the quiet moment when certainty has not yet arrived.

The first ripple.

The first returning thought.

The first sign that something long hidden beneath the surface is preparing to rise.

Perhaps that is why these opening lines remain so quiet.

Because the poem understands something essential.

The loudest storms rarely begin with thunder.

They begin beneath still water.

My Writing Process 

Sometimes the moments that change us do not arrive dramatically.

They arrive through a passing thought.

A remembered face.

A familiar voice.

A feeling we believed had already disappeared.

And before we realize what is happening, the surface begins to shift.

Not because something new has entered our lives—

but because something old has risen from the depths.

The ocean was never disturbed.

It was simply reminding us that it had always been there.