People think I am an ocean, but I am literally a puddle.

Just a puddle. They romanticize the ocean because its vastness makes the water look cleaner to them, but they are scared of my filth because it is right at the surface.

If you made the oceans muddy and filthy like a puddle, they would hate the oceans, too.

They do not actually love depth; they just love the distance that keeps the grime out of sight. There is a certain safety in the vastness of an ocean. People can stand on the shore and admire it because the scale makes the individual parts (the salt, the debris, the predators) invisible. They romanticize the horizon because they do not actually have to contend with the water. A puddle, however, is intimate. You can see the bottom, and you can see exactly what is floating in it.


Sadia Hakim // Letters Unsent

Our parents are the last generation