It took my grandfather’s memory before we could ask him one last question. It took a notebook full of poems I wrote in my twenties—lost in a basement flood. It took a relationship I had watered for years, only to watch it drift downstream like a fallen branch.

Lo que el agua se llevó. That is the hardest part to accept. The water doesn’t hate you. It doesn’t love you. It simply obeys its nature.

Not to mourn it forever. But to honor it. To say: You existed. You mattered. And now you are part of the great flow of everything that has ever been loved and lost.

There is a quiet wisdom in the Spanish phrase. It doesn’t say someone took something. It doesn’t blame. It doesn’t demand justice. It simply observes: The water took it.

And one day, without warning, it takes something. A job you thought was secure. A friendship you assumed would last forever. A version of yourself that you swore you’d never lose.