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She did not mean to sit with him.
She did not go looking.

But when others whispered his name to her,
something in her leaned closer—
wanting his life,
his memory,
his story.

Not the one they argued over.
Not the one they carved into pieces—

kind in one telling,
unkind in another,
loved by some,
rejected by others.

They fought over his image—
his skin, his eyes, his name, his clothing—
as if dividing him
could make him theirs.

They made him impersonal.
Distant.
Violent.
Fragmented
by their own confusion.

So she turned away
from the noise.

She did not travel to distant oceans
or bow to monuments in Jerusalem,
to rituals that burn like incense
and call themselves sacred
while quietly holding their captives.

No—

she entered the ocean she once feared.

An ocean of treachery,
of shifting tone and force.

Where waves once threatened,
she now sings—
soft as lilies
against their rise.

She does not fight the storm.
She listens.

And because she listens,
it listens back.

What builds—ferocious,
wild to the untrained eye—

she knows as order.

What appears chaos
reveals its pattern.

And she sees—

only the foolish search far away

when the ocean,
the man,
the island,
the sea—

were always within.

Before she learned his name.
Before anyone claimed him.

And in that seeing,

what was divided
begins to gather.

A man, once split by names and images,
returns to himself—

no longer distant,
no longer outside,

but living the life
he was taught to seek elsewhere.

Whole.

Because nothing
was ever separate.

Because none of us— not me, not you, not him—were ever separate from the universe, ever separate from God.