a cage in search for a bird - a palinode of derivation

I never belonged, not to the ocean, not to the wind, not to the hands that tried to hold me.
If I let that slip, they'd furrow their brows, as if certainty is something given, as if I was meant to be one thing and not another.
But once, long ago, I thought the same.
I never liked the way things clung-sand to skin, expectation to breath, meaning to the meaningless.
I never liked the way movement left traces, how the tide erased only to replace, how the wind never asked before shifting everything out of place.

Strange, isn't it?
How existence is a series of moments, strung together by nothing but our insistence that they are connected.
That we are one thing before we say it, and another after.
That a cage is empty until something moves inside it.
That we name the absence before we ever understand what was missing.

I was waiting, or maybe I wasn't. Maybe I was simply there, suspended between the thing I had been and the thing I would become.
Not knowing until the words left my mouth, until the idea crystallized, until it was too late to unthink what had already settled into shape.
The ocean—it was never the point. Only the space where the thought was formed.
A thing vast enough to make room for contradiction, for endless arrival, for the echo of what was never quite real until it was spoken.

Now, I keep returning-not because there is something to return to, but because something was placed there, a fragment of myself left behind in the telling.
Not because it was always waiting, but because I declared that it was.
Because the horizon, like any moment, is a construct-an illusion of distance where there is only continuity.
Perhaps that is the nature of being—not to find meaning, but to impose it.
Not to arrive, but to recognize that we are already somewhere.
That the cage and the bird are not separate things.
That the seeking is all there ever was.