Water Moon

by Samantha Sotto Yambao

Only people who still had dreams required a good imagination.

“I didn’t mean that in a bad way. It was a compliment. Your drive, all your achievements—you wouldn’t have them if you ‘fit in.’ Unlike people who quickly find their place in their little corner of life’s puzzle, you need to see and understand the puzzle in its entirety.”

“Time is a subject that physicists love to debate. I have colleagues who can go on for hours arguing about whether or not it exists, or if it increases or decreases. And yet here it is, salvaged from the dead and sold in bottles to travelers who are worried about being late.” Keishin sighed. “We spend all our lives studying the universe and what do we have to show for it? Do we really know anything at all?”

And if I fail, so what? That just means I’m eliminating a wrong turn and getting closer to the right one.

It was not a specific day or an exact moment. I did not wake up and suddenly feel that I loved you. The only answer I can give you is that it happened gradually. Slowly, and unnoticed, the way the ocean turns rocks into sand. And you are an ocean, Hana. Gentle and quiet, yet powerful enough to sweep away any man or ship. I drowned in you a long time ago and I did not even know it.”

College. Marriage. Kids. These were the big decisions that people believed mattered. They were wrong, of course. In reality, it was the choices that people didn’t even realize they were making that set the course of their lives. The shifts were small, even minute, but, by the tiniest of angles, they pointed one in the direction of what was going to happen next.