Let these words, then, be my gift to you; words you took without permission and made your own;words that I could not give you for they were not mine to begin with. 

These words, they belong to the Ocean and the Earth, and the grains of sand stranded in my bag, in my perfume bottle, where I least expect to find them; to the seagulls that float through the night sky as fluorescent streams; to the forms we humans try to make - we who are insufficiently adapted to this world; to the waves I remember from last night that are long gone - did they ever exist at all? to the winds that made them; to the rocks they make and shape; to the trees that are witness to our vulnerabilities; to the walls that cannot contain us; to the light that can’t shine bright enough; to the waters that run through us all, all at once, and separately, together; to the creatures who are not yet born but whom we have already sacrificed; to those already dead but not disappeared; to those othered bodies we left behind; to those minds that dare to think otherwise; to those who extend themselves to all living beings; to those animate and inanimate, all those with a soul; to all those who love and forget to be loved; to those learning how to swim in the open of extinction; to those who know how to be, without an effort to survive; to those who are not us; to those leaves that breathe for us; to those rocks that bleed for us; to those whose sweat and tears have turned black from the thankless, endless labour; to those who call darkness their home; to those who are at once ageless and ancient; to those that meander downstream through red and green jasper stones; to those who soar and fall and rise again; to those who could not care less whether you or I exist; to those too small for us to notice; to those who see without sight; to those who chew through the cables we humans insist on laying underwater.

These words belong to the Earth and the Ocean without ever being spoken ≈