Before Columbus drew his lines on stolen maps, our canoes already knew the current. We did not discover each other. We had always been in conversation โ Africa to the Caribbean, Caribbean to the Amazon, the Amazon to the Suriname river, and back again. The ocean was not a barrier. It was a road. We traded, we married, we built, we carried seeds and songs and sacred knowledge across waters that European eyes had not yet named. When they arrived with their flags and their chains, they called it discovery. But the river already had a name. The jungle already had a law. The people already had a memory older than their god. We were not waiting to be found. We were already home. And when they tried to break that thread โ the thread between our feet and the earth, between our hands and the wood, between our tongue and the ancestors โ We ran deeper into what we already knew. The jungle remembered us because we never truly left. Columbus was late. We were already here. We were already everywhere. We were already free.