For Dan
August 19th, 1978 — October 2024

I started writing this in the winter months after Dan died, and then had to put it aside for a while because it just felt too heavy. I’m coming back to it now, in honor of his birthday — the first with him not in his body, and not here to be celebrated by us. It feels awful to write digital eulogies to someone you loved, instead of getting to send them good wishes, or eat cake together. But here we are. Happy birthday, Dan. I’m still so mad at you.

I’ve wanted and needed to write this for you for a while — ever since I found out you were gone. This is the time I chose to finally do it, and I’ve been finding ways to avoid it for hours, weeks, months. I think because if I finally try to weave all the last little shreds of you I have gathered up like a bowerbird, I’ll realize how little there is. How little is left. But I’ll make do with what I have — because it matters.

You mattered, Dan. I wish you could have realized how much.

I’m also feeling a lot of resistance to having to do this again — for yet another person I’ve loved and lost. It just…fucking sucks. I hate that you’re dead, and I hate how you did it, and I hate that there isn’t that much of you still on this earth.

But that’s also why I feel like I have to do it, y’know? I mean, this is one of the only ways I know how to process the storm that’s been churning inside ever since I read the news from one of our mutual friends on Facebook. I’m a writer, like you were — that’s one of the things that brought us together, one of the places we connected. Words. We’re very different, of course — you loved Hemingway (too much, really) and trying your hand at short stories and novels, and I…Well, I write about my feelings. About the hard stuff that doesn’t have anywhere else to go. They say that grief is just love with no place to go, and so that’s what this is — a place for the love, and for my mourning.

I write for my dead so I can understand what I’m feeling, and so that I can make a little space to arrange all the tiny glimmering shards holding their reflection into an altar — a digital shrine to come and pay my respects, because I don’t know if you’ll have a gravestone, or where it will be. So this is what I have: some photographs of you, mostly on boats. Bits of our text conversations over the years. A handful of memories.

I’m still pissed at you for taking yourself out, for trying to auto-delete yourself from the world, from our lives. It started to feel real when I realized that you’d deleted all your social media accounts before you left this earth. Erased all records, all those memories, conversations, comments. Just gone. It was a cruel thing to do — to yourself, and to everyone who loved you. I imagine that there are a lot of people who are still looking for some semblance or shade of you, out in the ether.

Your @shimshak36 account has vanished from Instagram, and all the photographs you took from out on the sea — wiped away with the press of a button. Death does enough disappearing from us, already. I think it’s part of human nature to rail against that erasure, to cling to the locks of hair, the faded images, the gravestone rubbings, the digital footprints — especially in this virtual era where people are rarely buried in cemeteries, and funerals are not always held or attended.

I’m glad we got to have a memorial for you here, in Texas — and I know your family did one for you in up in Connecticut. I’m grateful to your friends who made it happen, who brought us all together for you. It was at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle — one of your significant places. The room was packed, and though I barely knew anyone there, it felt good to be surrounded by people who loved you — their faces drawn and stricken, tear-stained after hearing an excerpt read aloud from the novel you never finished. Your voice was alive in the room with us. There were many stories of your wild exploits, and lots of laughter amidst the tears — but it didn’t turn into a rowdy wake like you might have liked. No one cracked open the bottle of Famous Grouse scotch from your altar — though it was offered to me after everyone had left. I declined — and even seeing it there next to your framed photo (one of the last taken of you) made me sad, though I know you loved the stuff — far too much.

There’s a part of me that worries that I don’t have the right to write or share any of this about you. Who the hell am I? An old friend and tenuous halfway old flame who was barely in your life, at the end. I didn’t know you were living in Maryland, or what you’d been up to, in the past two years. We hadn’t been in touch since that last time we saw one another, out on the dark end of East 5th Street, after dinner at Justine’s. It was the last time I kissed anyone, and it was a long time ago, now.

I want you to know that I’ll keep my promises, and be respectful of the things you shared in confidence — but I also know that the dead need to be remembered, honored, and tended. This is one of the ways I know how to do that, and so I’ll do my best, for you, Dan.

Dan on Halloween, dressed as Capt. Quint from Jaws, a film we were both obsessed with.
All the photos included here are ones he sent to me.

In the many years that I have been writing for my dead here, I’ve found that their friends, family, and loved ones will often stumble across what I’ve shared, even decades after their passing. I know what it’s like to be up late grieving and fruitlessly googling, looking for some shred of that person online — a photo you haven’t seen yet (knowing there will be no more, past a certain date), or some answers as to where the fuck they went, and why. So though I write for my own healing, and to hold a place for the ones I’ve lost — it’s also for those other people who are missing you. Who are still looking for pieces of you out there.

If you’re one of those people who loved Dan, who probably knew him better than I did, I hope you’ll give me some grace in what I share here. And I hope in some way it’s helpful for you, in your grief for the loss of him.

I took these of Dan and Jenn Godsey, on Bastille Day at Justine’s – July 14th, 2010.
I’m sharing them all because any photo I have left of him feels very precious:

Dan and I met through mutual friend circles probably around 2010, and always had a liking for one another. Though we were both in relationships with other people back then, he was just someone I’d always wanted to get to know better. He came to the vintage themed parties I used to throw, and asked me to help throw his going away party/benefit in summer of 2011, to send him off to grad school, and away from Austin. It didn’t end up working out for me to make it happen, and after he left, we drifted apart until mid-pandemic, in October of 2020.

There was this app where you could check in with your phone contacts, and remind them to vote. I was desperate to get Trump out of the White House, and felt helpless, stuck at home without many easy ways to help make that happen. I texted Dan to see if he had a voting plan, and we ended up talking for a few hours after that, and then being in regular contact for a while.

I found out Dan had died in the days after the horror of Trump being re-elected, and the vines of my grief for both those awful losses got tangled up in each other. I hadn’t been able to cry or feel much beyond numb shock after it became clear that Kamala Harris was not going to be our new president, and that the fall of democracy was imminent — but when I heard about Dan, I just fell apart.

I went back through all of our texts back and forth, searching for… answers, clues, some indication that he would choose to end his life like this. The synchronicity of me reaching out to him again after years of not being in touch because of an election, and then hearing that he’d killed himself right before this next one was just… a fucked up full circle set of bookends to our odd friendship that was sometimes something more.

We were both lonely and isolated — him out on a yacht in the middle of the ocean that he was chartering, and me on my immunocompromised island, podless and unable to socialize safely (much less date anyone)… It was exciting to be in communication with him again — and to realize that we’d both been nursing secret crushes on one another for years. We flirted and FaceTimed and messaged back and forth for a bit, until I realized that it wasn’t going to work, between his drinking and the distance — both big dealbreakers for me. Too many wee hours rambling phone calls, with him slurring and me maudlin. I asked if we could go back to keeping it more friendly and less spicy, but I think it was tricky for both of us to maintain that, consistently.

What I have left are these fragments, bits of our late night text messages:

D: Vermillion is one of my favorite words
I was thinking just now of what type of gem you embody

Opal was the first thing that popped into my mind. But it seems silly not to say you remind me more of an emerald.

A: I think you might be sodalite. Looks like those blue breakers you love. Or topaz.

D: If I got to choose, I’d say garnet. But you can’t choose your own embodiment.

I would find them in the wild stuck in the granite when I was a child.

A: That’s magical! Do you still have some?

D: No. Not any. This was in Connecticut

Feldspar and granite and mica.

all beautiful words

I love those words

Slate and shale and turquoise and igneous

What are your favorite rock words?

metamorphs and pearls

A: Spectralite and peridot, chrysoprase and chrysocolla.
Chalcedony. Botryoidal.

D: Peridot is my birth stone

A: I know it.

D: But I always felt I was cheated somehow. It’s just a pale emerald.

A: What a Leo you are! Peridots are lovely. It’s a castelvetrano olive, in gem form.
I love green tourmaline even more than emeralds, honestly. As greens go.

D: Tourmaline is another of my favorite words

A: isn’t it wonderful?

D: and tourbillon – a similar word to your gem.
I like this one, too.
I like words that are funny cousins like that

A: Philtrum and plectrum

D: Flotsam and jetsam
Crepuscular and corpulent

A: Favorites, all

D: I’m going to head to bed. I love talking with you. Send me your five favorite words, based on their music alone.
Pretty please

A: It’s hard to choose, but these are my favorites at this moment:
Sussuration
Tintinnabulation
Twilight
Nacreous
Delphinium

D: Antebellum, Causeway, fo’c’s’le, halyard, catamaran

How are you hanging in?

A: Such marvelous words.
I’m exhausted, frazzled, and febrile. You?

D: Exhausted, a bit fragile, ashamed
I ran the boat aground today.
It was a confusing situation, and the navigational aids weren’t located where they should’ve been. But it was still rough

I don’t think I’m sodalite

A: I do love malachite… but I don’t think I am that. And we are definitely not death plates – though those are amazing! I was thinking earlier that you aren’t sodalite after all… What ARE you?

D: I can’t self identify in these situations!
One must choose expense
I’m going to continue to ruminate on it. I do keep thinking about topaz, though. That was my initial choice.

When I was a kid I always liked tiger eye and smoky quartz. But the things you like as kids don’t necessarily define you

A: I can definitely see tiger’s eye…& I love smoky quartz a lot. I feel like lots of the things I liked as a kid still define me – l’ve definitely always been…myself.

———————

Dan was born at 8:10am, on a Saturday, August 19th, 1978 — in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was 46 years old when he died, the same age I am now, writing this. He was always a year older than me, and now he never will be. He’d be 47 today, but he’s not, and never will be — or any other age.

One evening in November of 2020, I pulled his astrological chart for him:

D: My grandfather was born 8/18, the same as his father. I was supposed to be born then, but my mother was in labor with me for over a day. So, the 19th. She told me my grandfather was so incredibly pissed about this.

I’m afraid I don’t know what to make of this chart
Where’s North?

A: You’re a Pisces moon, Virgo rising.

D: The Pisces has always been a pain in my ass.

———————

I didn’t go into it with Dan at the time, but…Pisces moon people are incredibly sensitive, with deep flowing emotions. They are creative, soulful, and prone to addiction (with alcohol especially) and escapism. They take great comfort in all forms of water — especially the ocean. They are good listeners, patient friends, and deeply caring — but they struggle when expressing their own feelings. They might project as extroverts, but would usually rather go off alone to lick their wounds in private.

Piscean moons can be hopeless romantics — but suffer when the fantasy doesn’t match the reality they imagine for their lovers and relationships. They can also feel like they’re playing a part in a play, and can heavily mask who they truly are at their core by adopting a persona to hide behind. Developing a relationship with spirituality and a higher power can help keep them out of depression, but lunar Pisceans who are cut off from connection to the divine (however they understand it) and their own intuition tend to sink into depression and become pretty tortured.

I keep coming back to his chart, trying to make sense of the pain that led him to end his life, alone out there on the water. Was it his Chiron in the 8th house, or the curse of a 12th house Leo sun? It’s a puzzle I keep trying to piece together — all the disparate parts of him, the bits I knew, of what he chose to show.

I’m frustrated by this process — feeling like an archaeologist scrabbling around in the mud for pot shards that are melting in the rain. Like finding tiny scraps of a civilization that we know was once great, but there’s not much to show how grand and complex it was.

There shouldn’t be so little left of someone who was so BIG. I’m crying again now, thinking about his giant Leonine energy, and how he was like a circus tent, with the flaps pulled tight. You knew amazing things were going on in there, behind the curtains, but he didn’t always let you step right up and buy a ticket. When the booze was flowing, he was the ringmaster, the clowns, the strongman, and all the lions and monkeys loosed from their cages and running amok in that 3 ring circus, all at once. But so often, he kept it all on lock — under wraps. He kept secrets, even though he didn’t have to. I keep coming back to his complex mix of bombast, showmanship, demure decorum, utter shitshow fuckery, and hidden depths. There’s so much of him I feel cheated out of ever getting to know.

When we decided to revert back to the friend zone, Dan quoted that old Looking Glass song, Brandy, to me. I think it was kind of an anthem for him — and I think his fallback answer as to why he would always choose the seafaring life over settling down with anyone.

“The sailors say Brandy you’re a fine girl
(you’re a fine girl)
What a good wife you would be
(such a fine girl)
Yeah your eyes could steal a sailor from the sea…

Brandy wears a braided chain
Made of finest silver from the north of Spain
A locket that bears the name of the man that Brandy loved
He came on a summers day bringing gifts from far away
But he made it clear he couldn’t stay
The harbor was his home…

The sailor said Brandy you’re a fine girl
(you’re a fine girl)
What a good wife you would be
(such a fine girl)
But my life my love and my lady is the sea…
(doo-doo-doo-doo)
(doo-doo-doo-doo)

Brandy used to watch his eyes when he told his sailor stories
She could feel the ocean fall and rise
She saw its raging glory
But he had always told the truth — lord, he was an honest man
And Brandy (a-a-a-h…) does her best to understand…”

I felt it was a cop out back then, and I think it even more, now. I know Dan loved living on boats — and it feels both shitty and fitting that he chose to die on one. Is that how it happened? Today, another friend who loved him told me it was alone in a house with a gun. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore where or how — but that he was continually choosing versions of living that kept him isolated — kept him from the communities of friends who loved him fiercely. And ultimately that isolation made it possible for him to think that not living anymore was somehow a viable option.

When you think you’re all alone, you can convince yourself that no one will care if you decide to really disappear. Dan never had to worry about anyone asking him to change, or to take better care of himself, of love himself more — if he was married to the sea. And he never had to face the excruciatingly vulnerable ordeal of being truly known and seen. That’s the really scary part about letting people love you. But I know so many of us loved the hell out of him anyway — as much as he would let us.

One of our last real conversations about why we weren’t ever going to be a thing went like this (and this one still breaks my heart):

A: I do care about you, and want you to be supported. I know you have good people for that, too. Sending good wishes, always.

D: Thank you. There’s so many things that I wish were simpler. But, as you know, if wishes were horses…

Also, I’m so terribly upset. I’m afraid all of my charm is gone right now. I’m just hurting. And for that, I prefer to be alone.

But I certainly do appreciate hearing from you. Hopefully, in 3 weeks I’ll post something much more positive!

A: I hear that. I remember, when we talked about it before, how uncomfortable you were — being in pain around me.

Just remember – your friends love you, and don’t need you to be positive or strong all the time. I hope you have some folks you can let yourself be vulnerable with.

Your tears are a treasure — not a burden.

D: Thank you. You’ve been wonderful.
It’s very difficult for me to be vulnerable, visibly. Thanks for seeing me 🙂
Take care.

A: I know. I see you. And – it’s never too late to learn, y’know? You take care too, sweet Dan.

D: ‘Night

A: night night captain

———————

After that we would check in on holidays — which were especially weird in those years of Deep Covid.

D: Well, here’s to solitary and soon unsolitary!
Holidays go by. We all know who we love and why why we love them anyway

A: It’s true! And we will appreciate being able to gather soooo much more, when we can again!

D: I believe we will too

A: It’s good, in a way – to really not take those things for granted.
Being together. And how simple it all was.

D: And to really choose who you want to spend time with

A: That too!

D: Blood is for omens and bandaids.
Friends are for whom we really bleed

———————

The next (and last) time I saw Dan was in September of 2022. He was in town for a wedding I think, and asked if we could get together at Justine’s (one of my favorite local restaurants). We had a long dinner, and caught up over steaks and drinks. It was good to see him, but also confusing. I don’t think either of us were sure where we stood with one another, and I felt sad that it didn’t seem like we could talk about it. Especially after he walked me to my car, and we made out for a bit under the streetlight. We’d never actually kissed before, and I think we both wanted to get clear about what we might be missing out on? It’s hard to say, now. Eventually he got strange and drew away — I still don’t know why. We checked in a bit after that, and it was sweet — but I was left full of questions. I wish I’d asked them, now. I realized recently that…Dan was the last person I kissed (as of this writing), which feels strange to acknowledge. I’m holding out for my person, and not doing casual make-outs anymore, but I’m not sorry that we had that moment, though I do wish I’d known how he felt about it all.

I didn’t hear from him again until late July of last year. He was in Austin (I think for a friend’s memorial), and wanted to get together — but I was visiting one of our mutual friends in France. I told him I was in Paris, and that I was sorry to miss him. That was our last correspondence. I very much wish that I’d circled back around when I got home, checked in with him, wished him a happy birthday (on what would have been his last). But we always think that we have forever, that our friends who don’t tell us how much they’re struggling must be fine, and that there will be a tomorrow, a next time. I’ve been learning the hard way, over many years, that this just isn’t always true — but it’s still a shock when you find out that someone you assumed you’d always have in your life has made their exit. An Irish goodbye, in this case.

I don’t know a lot about the circumstances under which Dan made that decision, but I know that he had been battling his relationship with alcohol, on and off, for many years. I’ve heard from our friends that he had decided to try and get sober again not too long before he died, but I don’t know where he was at with all that when he made the terrible choice to seek a permanent solution for his temporary problems. I think for some people, the rawness of facing their emotions without that numbing agent is simply too much. I won’t surmise what was happening with him, further than that — but I know he was really hurting.

It makes me sick to think about — how much pain he was in, and the waste of his gorgeous self, his one and only precious life. I know he knew he had people he could reach out to, and I wish to god that he had, instead of dying alone out on the Bay off the coast of Maryland. As far as I know, he left no note.

All my life, I’ve had the dead come through in my dreams, and so I wondered if I would see Dan there. So far, he’s only come through once.

I’m out on a wide river at just past sunset, but I know it’s the kind of place where the sky and the light are always like that — crepuscular twilight, with the sun vanished over the horizon, but there is still a gradient of colors in the sky, fading perpetually into gray. We are in the West, where the spirits of the dead go to cross the river.

A friend of mine is there and he tells me he ran into my friend Dan. I speak aloud the wish that I could see Dan one more time, talk to him — and then he is there. I have my memory foam pillow and turn it into a big raft. I’m towing Dan and my friend Casey playfully on it, making it into a game — but I’m able to go so fast and I’m very strong. We’re helping him cross the river.

Dan is telling us that ever since he died, he is so hungry. He eats and eats but never seems to get full or feel satisfied. He went to some big holiday meals with his family, but… never managed to eat enough. We all joke around about his voracious appetite a bit — but when I wake, I realize that he has entered the realm of hungry ghosts. I hope in helping him cross over, he can go to the land beyond, where there always is enough. I pray his next incarnation will be gentler, and full of joy.

I wake up and it’s raining hard for the first time in a long time, and I think: Dan won’t ever experience another rainy morning. He won’t get to lay in bed, puzzling over heavy dreams. There are so many things he’ll miss out on, now. And so many things we’ll all miss out on, with him. I’m still so angry I won’t get to know him as a grizzled old man — and that we won’t get to sit around a fire, telling stories. I wish I could tell him that he created a huge rip in the fabric of the universe, by removing himself from this part of the story — and that none of us will ever get to know what that next chapter of his could have been.

I beg anyone reading this who has ever contemplated ending their life to please know that it is very rarely the answer to solving any problems — and that there is always help available. I respect everyone’s right to self-determination, and our lives should always be our own — but I’ve seen too many families and communities shattered by one person making that choice. So many people are completely heartbroken by Dan’s death, and I wish he could know how utterly loved and adored he was. I wish he’d chosen differently.

I want to include the obituary I found for Dan online, because I feel it’s important, and it already seems ephemeral and kind of hard to find. He deserves a place to be remembered — and though maybe this is kind of a strange place for that, I commit to keeping his memory alive, both here, and in my heart.

Beautiful Dan, with his broad, handsome, open face. He had a very big heart, and a passionate writer’s spirit. He was both rigorously moral and a bit of a rake, very capable and grounded but also extremely boisterous and a total hazard all at once — just full of contradictions. Dan loved hard, was a loyal friend, and was always very kind to both dogs and kids — who adored him. I don’t think you can get a higher seal of decency and kindness than that, in this world.

This is from a local Connecticut news website — I made a few copyedits, and am including it here, for posterity.

“Daniel John Szymczak, a 1996 graduate of Staples High School, died this week. He was 46.
A writer, teacher, boat captain and worldwide adventurer, Dan climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro last year. He lived in Florida, the Virgin Islands, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico, Alaska, and most recently Maryland.

At Staples, Dan wrestled and played football. He enjoyed fishing and hunting, and loved Ernest Hemingway, the English language, and his dog Charlie Murphy.

Dan earned a BA in English from the University of Texas, and an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University. After serving as an English lecturer at Texas State, an editor at the University of Texas and with Mc-Graw Hill Education, and a proofreader for the Texas Legislative Council, he embarked on a new career. Dan was a captain on a 205-foot offshore supply vessel; an engineer, mate and bosun on private yachts, and a deckhand with Lindblad Expeditions.

Dan is survived by his mother and step-father, Paula and Edward Barta; father and step-mother Gordon and DJ Szymczak; siblings Penny, Matt, Gregory and Stephen Szymczak, and Luke and Ben Barta; nieces and nephews Alexa, Easton, Jackson and Max Szymczak, and Hailey and Bailey Barta, and his former fiancée Faith Harty.

A memorial service will be held at a date to be determined.”

I send love, healing, and my deepest condolences to all his family, friends, and loved ones. I don’t know any of his relatives, but I’m thinking about them a lot, especially over this first year of holidays and birthdays and everything else without Dan. I know how brutal that is, and my heart goes out to all his people.

My heart is shipwrecked, hull cracked open, trying to write all this. I can’t stop crying, and it’s making my eyes too blurry to edit properly, so please forgive any errors, and please take care of yourself if you’re reading and crying with me.
We’re building a bridge with our grieving, and we don’t stand alone on it. I can promise you that.

Dan would send me photographs and videos of dolphins he captured from the boats he worked on. I had a filmmaker friend incorporate some of them into a video for a song that I recorded with my parents a few years ago. I had sent the song to Dan, when we first reconnected, because of course it made me think of him. After he died, my dad reminded me that he believes the last stanza obliquely references death — so it feels all the more poignant, now.

Sea Fever

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

— John Masefield

Sea Fever – from the poem by John Masefield, set to music by David Polacheck.
Vocals by Angeliska
Arrangement and banjo by David Polacheck, with Karen Polacheck on guitar.
The tune is “Matt Hyland”
Dedicated to the memory of Dan Szymczak (1978 – 2024), who loved the sea.
The dolphins were filmed by him, out on the ocean.
Video created by Justin Wilson

D: It was really nice to hear your voice tonight.

Here’s my take on dolphins:

Common Dolphins riding our wake near the Channel Islands north of LA. They raced us for nearly five miles at thirteen and a half knots, bursting from the water with effortless grace. I don’t get excited when I see fish, unless they’re in great schools or brightly colored or dangerous.

Because a fish is the water, it breathes it in and only leaves it on a hook or as a last resort.
But Dolphins breathe air, as we do. They find themselves born in the water and so must make the best use of it or die.

In a sense they are visitors there—they belong to the water but not in it. But they master it, as dancers master that small bit of sky above the stage or figure skaters the ice.

It was important to me to capture what I felt about them as accurately as I could. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.

That’s how I’m feeling about what I’m trying to do here — capturing Dan accurately is as difficult as trying to do it for those fleeting, fantastic dolphins. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s what I have. I hope it will do.

I shared the above passage about dolphins from Dan at his memorial, sang Sea Fever for him, and also this poem (one of my favorites), by Rumi. I read it aloud to him, years ago. It cracks me open now, in a way it never did before. I sat with it again after I got the news of his suicide, and had to just lay down and sob for a long time. I’m grateful I got to share these things with him, while he was still alive. I just wish he was still here, with us.

You are sitting here with us,
but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.

You are yourself the animal we hunt
when you come with us on the hunt.

You are in your body
like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you are wind.

You are the diver’s clothes
lying empty on the beach.
You are the fish.

In the ocean are many bright strands
and many dark strands like veins that are seen
when a wing is lifted up.

Your hidden self is blood in those,
those veins that are lute strings
that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of surf,
but the sound of no shore.

— Rumi