Blissful Mornings - The Tide That Speaks

Salomé arrived on the island with a hush.

Not the kind of silence that comes from absence, but the kind that enters a room before a

revelation. She stepped off the small ferry boat barefoot, carrying nothing but a satchel

woven from pandan leaves and a softness in her spirit that caught Sonia’s breath.

They met by the museum—the sacred space beside Mar’s swaddle cottage where the

ancestral blankets hung like prayers. Sonia had just finished placing the newest one when

she felt someone behind her.

“Excuse me…” the woman said.

Sonia turned, and in that moment, she felt it. Recognition without reason.

“I believe I’m meant to find you,” Salomé said.

From her satchel, she unrolled a delicate parchment—aged, fragrant, and hand-drawn. A

sketch of a swaddle, nearly identical to the ones Sonia and her sisters had made. It bore the

same crescent-shaped stitch. The same muted dyes from Genhe’s sacred pigments. But the

cloth… had never been part of Sonia’s collection.

“My grandmother kept this hidden for years,” Salomé explained, voice steady. “She said it

was given to her by a woman of light hands and sea-colored eyes. A weaver of protection. A

keeper of songs.”

Sonia’s heart pulsed in her throat.

“There’s more,” Salomé added, carefully. “She told me that one day, when I dreamed of the

name Vernardita, I would know it was time to return it. To find the woman who carried her

voice in the wind.”

Sonia’s knees softened. She reached for the sketch, her fingers grazing the aged paper like a

thread from her own past.

“I’ve only ever heard that name in one place,” she said. “In water.”

Salomé nodded, not surprised.

“I dreamed of water too,” she whispered. “And a song made of salt.”

They sat together on the museum’s woven mat, and Sonia offered Salomé a warm drink of

taro and coconut. She listened as Salomé shared the full dream—of dolphins swirling in

blue, of an island wrapped in gold light, and a girl with a swaddle cradled to her chest,

humming a lullaby.

“She said, ‘Take this back where it belongs.’” Salomé paused. “So I did.”

Sonia looked to the sea, then back to the parchment. This wasn’t coincidence. This was

remembrance.

The parchment would later be placed beside the original swaddles in the museum, honored

as the “Journeyed Cloth.” And Sonia would begin to wonder if Salomé wasn’t just a

visitor—but a distant thread from the same tapestry… someone born of legacy, returning

with her own song to stitch.

-Bliss Chains Authors