The Myth of Return
Once,
before clocks
but after memory,
a soul surfaced.
Salt in his veins.
Moonlight threaded through bone.
Born of the trees,
but claimed by the sea.
Called by a ghost shore
he’d never explored.
An ache of something unfinished.
He wandered,
a mute gyroscope,
maps on fire,
lips split by the wind,
chased by Phoenician whispers,
a language old as love itself.
The old ones had heard it,
that pulse behind the ribs.
They vanished chasing it.
He didn't speak their tongue.
But he somehow understood it.
He is the Seer, returning.
Not as one, but as many:
a host of vanished footsteps
folded into his own.
He comes to the cliffs
where myth licks the shore,
to sands where time drapes
like linen hung to dry.
He stands still long enough
to hear the silence speak.
And what did the ocean say
when he finally arrived?
Nothing.
It breathed.
And in that breath
centuries unspooled.
The fever of exile
bled out into the tide,
vanished like smoke in a chapel.
He brought no gold.
No banner.
Just his very human modern breath.
And hands that didn’t grasp.
His gift was presence.
His offering:
I am awake to this ground.
I speak salt and shadow.
I have wandered long,
but I remember now.
And in remembering,
he began to build
a sanctuary.
A world from rhythm and ruin.
Laughter echoing in the olive groves.
Stories pooled under linen shade.
Wine-kissed lips.
The sea hanging in the air
like a hymn unsung, waiting.
He mapped his shadow
with bare hands,
returned to the sandstone cave
where his name wafted.
And the Algarve?
She waits.
Barefoot, dusk-warmed,
smiling like she’s heard this story before.
Um velho amante,
tracing his return
by the sound of his breath.
The Myth of the Moment He Knew
There was no trumpet.
No cracking open sky.
No descending angels.
Just a moon,
full and low,
a secret lantern
amid the long-boned Georgia pines.
The air thick with old stories.
"You’re not lost. You're remembering forward."
Barefoot on the porch,
heart a cathedral of ache and lightning,
and the wind—
that kind wind—
kissed his jaw the way his mother did
when she knew her boy must leave
to become a man.
A key long buried in the marrow turned,
and the door swung open.
Tucked in an old book
he hadn’t meant to open.
The page, the name.
Algarve.
But books open when
it’s their time.
And something broke.
Gently.
Like ice at first thaw.
He wept—not for leaving,
but for how long he’d stayed
after his soul had packed its bags.
So he whispered a strange kind of yes,
tears and cedar smoke and
a final Georgia breeze.
And the wind answered back,
"Go, Seer. Go.
You do not belong where you are.
You belong where you are yet to be.”
The Myth of Letting Go
He stood in the center of his life
as if in a great cathedral—
walls made of memory,
furnishings of love and loss,
canvases whispering with color,
each one a ghost of a dream
he had dared to make real.
It was not easy to walk these rooms.
Not with a key in his pocket
and the sea calling like it did
before he was born.
He ran his fingers
across the spine of an old chair,
felt the dent in the cushion
where he had once wept for a woman
whose name he tried to forget
but whose eyes still visited his sleep.
Each object had a voice.
Each voice a tether.
He was not leaving things.
He was laying down selves.
Selves he had outgrown
but still loved.
Letting go wasn’t a single act.
It was a ritual.
A conversation with every fragment:
“I honor you. I thank you. I release you.”
Even the telltale patch,
the corner where the blinding pain
once tried to claim him.
Even the canvas that never became
what he coaxed it to be.
They remembered him better
than he remembered himself—
not as he was,
but as he almost became.
Not so much a little death
as composting, breaking the soil
to allow something wild and true to root.
And though his hands trembled
as he opened each drawer,
his heart grew more resolved
with every goodbye.
He moved room to room with reverence.
A house is a mirror.
And this one had held him
through seasons of silence,
storms of becoming,
and sunlight that fell
just right on days when he forgot his worth.
Now it stood hushed,
as if watching him
with the gentle sadness
of something that knows
it is being honored
by being released.
He did not pack everything.
Some things, he simply touched.
“You don’t need to carry me anymore.”
There was a box—
a small one—
for the sacred few.
A note. A poem.
A photo of someone
he can never stop loving.
But mostly, he left space.
Space for breath.
For arrival.
For becoming again.
The letting go did not empty him.
It made him available.
Some things cradle you just long enough
to teach you how to walk again.
Some things are only there
to steady your step
until the road shows up again.
And as the door closed
for the final time,
he didn’t look back.
Because the wind had changed.
And he could feel the sea
already waiting for him—
like an old friend
who had saved him a seat
beside a fire
he’d never seen.
The Myth of the Genie in the Bottle
The soul seeks peace in distant lands.
Salt air will surely quiet my fevered mind.
Ancient hills and olive trees will bend the vanished light.
And so, the traveler goes.
Oceans, mountains, rocky plateaus, ancient cities.
Anywhere but here.
Believing with whole-souled zeal
that distance is balm for the ache,
that newness might soothe a restless mind.
But there’s a ghost in the lining of my coat.
A familiar ache in unfamiliar rooms.
In the new house, the bread is warm.
The sky is a different blue.
The days stretch to the endless sea.
Restlessness sets the table.
Longing wanders the cobbled streets.
Ennui slips under the covers.
And soon, the beauty fades.
Not the beauty but my perception.
It cannot do what I asked of it.
The myth is this:
that somewhere else will save you.
That peace is not a practice
but a place.
The storm returns.
No lightning.
Just memory and salt.
A gangly pirate, up from the deep.
The Myth of the Days of Glory
He remembered them wrong, of course.
That’s how glory works—
a trick of the rearview mirror,
where everything shimmers just enough
to make you ache for a time
that never quite happened
the way your heart says it did.
Back then, the air was loud with striving.
Late nights, fueled by weed and wonder.
Songs spilled out of him
like his soul had struck oil.
Every room a stage.
Every glance a possibility.
Even the heartbreaks had better lighting.
He wore ambition like a raincoat.
He burned with wanting
until the wanting became the point—
a pearl of ache, polished into art.
And the world applauded—
or seemed to,
if you didn’t look too deep.
He mistook noise for meaning,
movement for direction,
desire for destiny.
The Old World knows this myth well.
She’s made cathedrals of it—
carved in stone and gold,
tucked into the folds of her gowns.
A kingdom's worth of stories
about kings who mistook conquest
for communion.
She wears her past like perfume and regret.
Tile by tile, she remembers her ships,
her saints, her sea-blooded pride.
But the empires are museums now—
dust and velvet ropes.
The glory is curated.
The hunger, embalmed.
The traveler walks her ancient streets,
his own past rattling like old coins
in the pocket of a coat he forgot to mend.
Memories dressed up like kings.
But kings are just men
who couldn’t let go of the fire.
He sees it now—
how both he and the world
confused survival with triumph.
How nostalgia sells you
the parts of yourself
that never really were,
but for the courage.
In the days of glory,
he was always leaving something.
Always chasing a god
whose name kept changing.
He called it success.
Then love.
Then meaning.
But it was always the same beast,
shimmering just out of reach.
And it’s still there,
whispering through cork trees
and crumbling fortresses:
If only you could do it again…
But this time, better.
The traveler laughs—
not with joy, but recognition.
He knows that voice.
He used to sing with it.
“You had your time.
You lit your fires.
But I am not your fuel anymore.”
Glory doesn’t die.
It fades into the bones.
Becomes story.
And stories—
if you’re not careful—
become cages.
So he opens the window.
Lets the wind in.
Lets the empire out.
He does not renounce the myth.
He rewrites it.
Now the witness.
A man who walked through fire
and learned
he didn’t have to burn
to be seen.
He bows to the past—
not to worship,
but to bury it.
Then turns his face to the sea,
where no statues stand,
no trumpets blare—
only the unmarked moment,
rising with the tide.