They talk about ammunition and borders like they’re the whole story. Out here, we know the sea remembers men long after the papers stop printing their names. A fisherman doesn’t forget the silence after a son’s boat never comes back, or how his wife folds the same towel every morning like he might still need it. War isn’t only fought with guns—sometimes it’s a government letting your harbor rot while foreign trawlers suck the ocean clean. My father disappeared during the crackdown in ’85. They called it “disappeared,” like he walked off, like the sea took him. I know the sea. It doesn’t steal quietly. Men do.
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