The Girl Between Two Seas

By Casey Huang

My grandmother Hermiña lived in a place where the horizon was not water but sugar.

Her world was a sea of sugarcane—green and endless—where the wind moved through the stalks like a quiet tide. Farmers cut the cane and loaded it onto trucks that rolled toward the refinery everyone simply called Central Azucarera.

My world was different.

My mother and I lived on another island, where the horizon was the ocean. When I stood by the shore, I would stare at the water stretching farther than my eyes could follow. Whenever I looked at that sea, I thought of my grandmother.

And she would tell me she thought of me too.

“When I look at the sugarcane,” she would say, “I think of you.”

As a child I sometimes suspected she thought of me because I had been naughty.

I teased her constantly. She teased me back. We argued. I hugged her. Everything was forgiven.

She didn’t visit often. But whenever she did, I felt like someone glamorous had arrived in our small world, like a movie star stepping out of a black-and-white film. I loved her visits. I waited for them.

And I dreaded them.

Because whenever my grandmother came, my favorite clothes disappeared.

She packed them carefully into her suitcase and took them back across the sea to give to other children.

Once, furious and wounded, I called her a thief.

“Not a thief,” she corrected me calmly. “Charitable.”

At five years old, charity felt like theft.

Some of those dresses I had designed myself, watching the dressmaker stitch them together. Losing them felt like losing small pieces of my world.

Then my grandmother showed me photographs.

Children I had never met were wearing those dresses. They were smiling—huge, bright smiles inside small printed pictures.

It was the first time I understood something quietly miraculous: giving could make more happiness than keeping.

I stared at those photographs for a long time.

“I want to make people smile too,” I told her.

“You can,” she said.

“How?”

“Through kindness.”

I thought about it.

“But how do I make them smile even when I’m not there?”

She looked at me and answered as if the solution were obvious.

“With words. With songs. With poems. With stories. With movies. With creativity. With kindness.”

I was five years old.

During her visits she woke me every morning with a poem.

“Wake up my love,” she would sing softly.
“Early to bed, early to rise
Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

I refused to get up.

“I am not a man,” I protested from under the blankets. “This poem is not for me.”

She paused.

Then she tried again.

“Early to bed, early to rise
Makes our Casey healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

That version worked.

I rose—still slightly offended—but curious about the poems she read afterward.

Soon she taught me how to write them.

After she returned to her sugarcane sea, we continued writing to each other in poems. I would hand my letters to the postman and imagine them traveling across the ocean, from my sea of water to her sea of green.

Years passed.

My grandmother is gone now. The oceans and fields that once separated us feel smaller somehow.

But I still write to her.

Through poems. Through stories.

Maybe someday through the screen.

More than a decade has passed since she left this world, yet one memory stays clear: the photographs she showed me long ago. I no longer remember the children’s faces. But I remember their smiles.

Recently, almost by accident, I created something that made me think of her again.

A small poem I wrote became a children’s story. That story grew into an idea for helping communities through storytelling and creativity. I called the framework Permanent Licensing with Exclusive Territorial Stewardship, or PLETS. The project that came from it is called Bella Impact.

I am still not entirely sure what that idea will become.

But sometimes I suspect that everything I make—every poem, every story, every strange creative plan—is simply another letter traveling across the water.

Still writing to my grandmother.

Still trying to understand what she meant when she said happiness can be given away through kindness, through words, through creativity.

I may never make you immortal, Hermiña.

But I will try—
through kindness.