SOME MEMORIES ARE INSTRUCTIONS.

An island ringed by dark water and open sky. Stone rising from the land like sentinels. We lived by the sea and by the knife-edge of honor. I was born into leadership, not because I sought it, but because loss placed it in my hands early.

One of my parents was taken in a war with another tribe. The grief hardened the elders. My grandmother’s voice was sharp with memory and vengeance; she believed retaliation was survival. I listened. I learned. I carried her fire.

We sailed often then. The sea was not a boundary but a road. I loved the feeling of wind filling the sails, the quiet competence of the boat beneath my feet. We fished the waters around the island and traveled outward to neighboring lands, gathering fruit, trading, watching unfamiliar shores. Once, on another island, I saw a bird unlike any I’d known — large, bright, almost impossible in its color — and I remember thinking that the world was far wider than our feuds.

But we were violent in those days. Precision violence. Purposeful. Each strike justified by a previous wound. After one particularly vicious act of revenge, I returned home and felt something fracture inside me. The land felt heavier. The stone watched without approval. I knew we had crossed a line that could not be crossed back.

I married then. My wife was patience made visible. Calm where I was sharp. She carried peace without preaching it. With her, I had two sons, and for a time I believed I could turn my back on the cycle — that the future could be gentler if I simply chose it.

But vengeance travels.

The neighboring tribe retaliated. Fire came in the night. I lost a child to the flames. Something in me went quiet after that — not numb, but emptied of certainty. The old justifications no longer held.

We were forced to leave our place and join another tribe on the island. There, in the unraveling of my former status, I made another mistake — I fathered a son with another woman and did not claim him. Pride still lingered then. Fear of scandal. Fear of weakness.

Age softened what grief could not. As years passed, the sharpness left me. I stopped teaching my sons how to strike back and began teaching them how to endure. How to remain present. How to choose restraint when violence offered itself easily. Even the son I had once abandoned — I sought him out and tried, imperfectly, to show him another way.

I remember my burial.

Stone above me. One of the great heads watching the horizon, as it always had. I remember knowing that my life had been about learning to turn strength inward — from conquest to stewardship, from reaction to wisdom.

Some part of me understood, even then, that the lesson would not end there.

That it would be carried forward.