Meet Sara.
on the yearning that never quells.
Happy AANHPI & APIDA Heritage month! All month, I’ll be featuring phenomenal humans from the Asian diaspora, along with a snapshot of their creative work. Each of these friends is someone I treasure deeply and think you should know, learn from, support, and follow.
Meet Sara Fichtner.
The Sea in Me
by Sara Fichtner
(originally published in Ancestory + Culture - part of In The Mix)
You planted in me a love for the ocean, but a life so far from its shores. Maybe the love originates from a thread deeper than you, one that reaches back to our ancestors whose home on the islands was all they knew.
How did we get so far away from them? Or them from us?
It wasn’t planned. I think it started with another love, love for a person whose life was firmly planted among fields of corn, someone who knew little of the power of crashing waves. Even I would do the same for love, it seems, falling for a person whose home is among lush green forests and deep red earth – instead of deep blue water.
Yet all that love never quelled the yearning for the sea in me.
The yearning for a life where the sound and rhythm of waves is not a machine to lull me to sleep, but creation, real creation bringing me to life. I see the shifting lines of vibrant color in the sky each time the sun rises and sets over the water. I feel my feet settling into the hot sand and finding relief with the rising tide. I breathe in the salty air with a recognition deeper than I understand.
Sometimes I imagine an old woman with wrinkles and brittle bones sitting at the edge of the shore with shells lined up in front of her, a shell for each worry and each hope. The sea is home, she is home, so her worries and hopes pass like waves out and out until they become a part of a larger story.
Is she the future or the past? Is she me or my ancestors?
Either way, we are where we are meant to be.
Sara Fichtner is a Hoosier-Filipina writer, reader, and cultural connector. She writes from her experience navigating the in-between spaces and searching for connection. “In the Mix with Sara” is her quarterly Substack letter filled with writing and resources on connecting through culture. Sara and her Argentine husband have two sons and are short-term foster parents to immigrant children journeying to connect with family in the U.S.
Find and follow Sara here:
Substack:
Website: www.sarafichtner.com
Instagram: @_sarafichtner, Facebook: /writersarafichtner
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