The salt wind lifts your hair like a veil woven of sea spray and late afternoon gold. I walk beside you, watching the sun weave threads of copper and amber through those unruly strands—each one a verse in the unwritten summer poem we are slowly composing with our bare feet in the wet sand.

Out beyond the lazy arc of the cove, the rocks lie half-submerged, ancient and drowsy in the tidal pull. Who’s to say what moves in those sapphire depths? Perhaps a sea serpent with scales like polished obsidian coils patiently around a mermaid whose laughter rings in the foam and pearl. Perhaps they are lovers, bound not by myth but by a quiet understanding older than Troy, deeper than legend.

You ask if I am Helen—the face that burned a city for desire.
No, my love. I am no cursed queen. My beauty, if it exists at all, is the kind that settles rather than destroys—the kind that soothes waves, that composes sonnets in the silence between heartbeats, that builds quiet kingdoms in the shelter of shared glances. Cities need not fall where I walk; gardens grow.

And you wonder if I am the mermaid, circled by adoring tentacles.
Not that either. I am something simpler: just a woman walking with you at the edge of the world, where the sea meets the sky in a sigh of horizon. No monstrous courtship, no epic fate—only this moment, your hand in mine, the gulls crying overhead like forgotten poets, the tide telling its eternal, gentle lie of return.

We are neither myth nor metaphor.
We are only us: two lovers walking a shore that will remember our footprints only until the next wave—and that is enough.
Let the ships launch for other harbors.
Our Troy is here, in the soft wooing of the waves, in the lightness of being no one but ourselves, utterly, tenderly, unrepeatably real.