Dear Humanity: We are all surviving something

A letter to anyone who has ever had to find their way back

There is a moment I return to often. I am on a train traveling along the California coast, watching the Pacific Ocean through a window, and something inside me goes very quiet. Not the quiet of emptiness — the quiet of arrival. After everything I had crossed to get there — an ocean, a genocide, a childhood full of things no child should carry — I was here. On a train. Watching the sun set over water. Alive.