Omaha Beach, 2025

The sand is quiet now.

Too quiet for what it remembers.

We walked where the sea split open —

not with miracles, but with metal,

mud, and boys barely born into their names.

They called it liberation.

And it was.

In that moment.

Resistance against tyranny.

But the ghosts don’t chant slogans.

They just hum —

low, relentless —

like a plane overhead,

like a lie you almost believe.

I stood ankle-deep in the Atlantic

and wondered —

when did the liberators

turn into landlords with guns?

And then I remembered —

they always had been.

Because freedom was always

about who gets to write the story,

and whose body becomes the footnote.

I thought of the birth of America —

a genocide painted in muskets and myth,

built on stolen land and enslaved hands.

I thought of the flags

planted in sand —

like warnings,

or promises.

And I stood there,

on the same beach where history

still bleeds through the silence,

thinking how a nation can die

for liberation,

then crush the liberty of others

whenever it sees fit.

And the contradiction

was a wound,

a wave,

a whisper —

and this is what empire feels like

in the bones.