Biofilm as a Mother Tongue

The hair comes ashore like a confession—syllable by syllable, dark and wet. It accumulates the way silence does in a house after the door closes. One strand, then another, then too many to count. Black threads against the sand like your mother's writing, the letters she never taught you to read. Each strand a refugee from somebody's head, somebody's morning, somebody's lover running fingers through darkness before the leaving.

What the ocean takes, it returns broken. Or no—transformed. See how the kelp genuflects, its body all vertebrae and no spine. How it prays the way the drowned pray: horizontal, arms spread into tomorrow.

Little mother, the bacteria sing. Little father, answer the algae. They build cathedrals invisible to our kind of seeing. In the space between one grain of sand and another, entire cities rise. Biofilms like psalms written in living ink, each colony a paragraph in the book of holding on.

The machine stitches what it thinks is a map. But I know these lines. They're the same ones across my grandmother's palms, across the soles of feet that walked from one country into another. The needle enters and exits, enters and exits. Like breathing. Like drowning. Like the way we love—piercing the surface to prove we were here.

Look closer. The barnacles write their stories in calcium. Small mouths frozen mid-sentence. They grow where the hurt pools, where salt crystallizes into memory. Each shell a house for what refuses to leave.

And the hair—is it yours? Mine? Does it matter when we all end up here, at the edge where land forgets its name? Sometimes I think the ocean is just a room where everyone we've lost goes to take off their shoes. Sometimes I think the strand of hair wrapped around the rock is the only letter that ever arrives.

The stitches want to say: here is where the breaking happened. But what they really say is: here is where we tried to hold it together. The thread pulls tight. The image tears anyway. This is the honesty of repair—it points to the wound while claiming to heal it.

Little ghost, I see you in the biofilm. Little ancestor, building your bridge one cell at a time. You who know that home is not a place but a process, that belonging is what happens when the smallest parts of us refuse to let go.

The tide rises. The hair tangles deeper. Somewhere, a mother is calling a child in for dinner. Somewhere, the machine keeps stitching an ocean that won't stay still.