One of the women caught my eye. She was older, maybe thirty, with elegant features and carefully maintained hair despite her circumstances. When our gazes met, her eyebrows rose in a silent question.
I gave a tiny shake of my head.
She shrugged, a baffled gesture I felt in my soul.
“No talking!” A guard’s bark cut through the moment. He stepped between us, breaking our line of sight, but dared not raise a hand or whip. “Walk. No talking, no touching.”
We obeyed, circling the deck like horses being trained, each lost in our own confusion.
But I’d seen it in their eyes. They didn’t understand either. They were as baffled as I was by our treatment, by the contradiction of being prisoners who ate like lords while slaves suffered in the hold below.
That night, lying on my bunk, I heard a woman for the first time. She was in the cabin next to mine. She was crying. Her sobs were soft and muffled, tears not meant to be heard. But the walls were thin, and the ship was quiet save for its endless creaking and the distant shouts of sailors above.
I pressed my hand against the wall, wishing I could offer her comfort but not daring to speak. The guards had been clear: No talking, no contact.
The woman cried well into the night, long enough that my own eyes began to burn in sympathy. Eventually, she quieted, and I pulled away from the wall, curling onto my side and struggling to sleep.
The next morning, I heard her again, only this time, she wasn’t crying.
She was singing.
Her melody drifted through the wall, soft and ethereal, like nothing I’d ever heard. I couldn’t make out all the words at first.They were in a dialect I didn’t fully recognize, but the emotion layered within them was unmistakable.
Love. Loss. Longing.
And something else.
Hope.
I sat up slowly, transfixed.
Her voice was beautiful, but not in a practiced, polished way—in the way of something raw and real and utterly unbroken. She sang like someone who still believed there was something worth singing about, even here, even now. The words gradually became clearer as I listened:
Beyond the mountains, beyond the sea,
There waits a love who remembers me.
Though chains may bind and darkness fall,
My heart flies free beyond these walls.
My throat tightened.
She sang of home, of someone waiting for her, of hope that transcended iron and wood and the endless rocking of the ship.
I pressed my hand against the wall again, as if I could reach through it and touch that hope, hold it close.
She sang every day after that, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night, always the same songs, or variations of them. Songs about love that endured. About light in darkness. About holding on when everything screamed to let go.
I clung to those songs like a drowning man clutches driftwood.
In the dark hours, when my mind turned to terrible places—to Tooi burning, to my family lying dead in the streets, to Yoshi likely broken and forgotten—the woman’s voice pulled me back.
The dawn will come, the night will fade,
And love will find the path we made.
Though oceans part and years go by,
