Stoic was the man that waded through the waters of the mangroves. His arms and legs
branchlike as he plucked propagules from the life-like arms of the plants that deposited them.
The waters reflecting nothing and everything as he cast the seedlings out to a life they must
now create on their own. Random yet startlingly precise he drags his arms through the waters
and decides the fate of those who enter them.

“This is not your home.” his voice a deep timber, carrying across the waters to the track road
that G’Gee found herself staring from. His ritual was therapeutic and she had almost forgotten
the reasons that directed her path. The courage that she had mustered had long flitted away
into the humid air of the surrounding mangrove. “I–” she hesitated, fiddling with her fingers and
shuffling from one foot to the other “I wanted to ask you about my grandmother.” The man
continued his ritualistic water combing almost as though G’Gee had not uttered a word. His long
arms seemed to stretch the entire length of the vast mangrove system all while G’Gee watched
on, her heart hammering away in her chest creating an almost hollow echo throughout her body
that seemed to reverberate across the waters. “I need to find her. If I can find her then I can fix
this.” she sheds a single tear. One tear that acted as the barricade to all of the feelings she had
bottled inside of her. The flood gate was now open and G’Gee’s tears are desperate as she
cries to this supposed keeper of fates. Every piece of fear and anger, regret and deep hurt, fell
into the mangrove creating its own special whirlpool of despair. “If I can find her, then I can tell
her that I’m sorry.”

Water carries sound. It also carries long and drawn out bouts of silence and that silence can
stretch to the ends of the world making one remember just how lonely we could be.
“I was waiting on a fishing boat.” The ancient timber startles G’Gee and she is suddenly looking
into the eyes of the watercomber. “I sat on that wall overlooking this great forest and I waited.”
The watercomber then rose to his full height and guided G’Gee to the edge of the mangroves.
“Look.” At first she saw only the sky reflected in the waters but then she began to vividly
experience the watercomber’s memory of a time she knew nothing of. Several fishing boats
drifted in and out of the mangroves, yet the then young watercomber climbed aboard none. “I
was waiting on a fishing boat.” The now elderly watercomber looks on at his younger reflection
with a pained reminiscence and an almost forced kindness.

“I waited so long that I became one with the forest, this soil is my home, not yours.”
Time in the mangroves moved like sweat across a weary traveller’s body. Slick and
painstakingly slow. Irritating and uncomfortable, a discomfort that more often than not merges
with memory. And even then it seemingly stood still in the mangroves, it rushed and breezed
through the outskirts of the islands. Hours turned into months, turned into love lost and love
found, turned into a house filled with children and then grandchildren, turned into a generation
of traditions turned into him still waiting for his one true love on a fishing boat that would never
return. The Mangrove had now become a capsule of all his grief, all of his pain. His hopes and dreams reflected into the pools, a reminder of a life left unlived.