February 17, 2026

the return **

She was ready for the next chapter of her story. Had put the worst of it behind her. Dug into the work that needed doing. Pressed on. Time was healing. She emerged from the wreck nearly newborn. Felt as if she had wings for feet. Anything was possible now that the fire hadn’t swallowed her up, had spared her for flight. In the early spring chill, she suited up. Made her plucky journey to the edge. The surface slate-blue as an old bruise. Hardened clots of sand. Horizon line. The planet of her future beckoned wetly. But the first wave arrived like a whale, broke her moorings from under her, and there was nothing to do but hobble back to dry land, back to forlorn gazes out car windows, to the wishing and want. That old aloneness. And what she couldn’t have seen or known—what none of us sees or knows—was how much we need the interference of another to disturb us from our stubborn self-reliance, the tight certainty of our solitary narrative. We need someone to bump our to-go cups out of our hands, to cut us off in traffic, to buy the last bundle of flowers, to leave trash at the picnic table, to take too much time in the toothpaste aisle. In the same way we need someone to take our photographs in foreign places, point us to the restroom, give us estimates for a repair, reach for the upper shelf when we can’t. Someone to return us to the orbit where the oxygen of our own rotation replenishes its supply. And so it went that a stranger would come upon a winged foot at the edge of a slate-blue sea and wonder where the swimmer was, then make her way across the rocks, across time and brokenness, to bring it back, to make things whole.

* This poem is inspired by a recent New York Times article, entitled “The Sea Took Her Prosthetic Leg. Months Later, It Gave It Back.”