Solo volver (Just Come Back)

The sea did not ask

where I had been

or why it took me so long.

It kept my place

between salt and sky,

as if leaving had never meant

I no longer belonged.

I came back carrying

everything I had lost

and everything I had learned

to hold in silence.

The water did not try

to return me

to who I had been.

It only made room

for who arrived.

And for once,

that was enough.

Some places do not wait

for us to return unchanged.

They wait because they know

no one ever does.

We come back

with different questions,

different wounds,

another way of seeing the horizon.

And still,

the sea recognizes us.