Growing up, the grove meant safety, threading its embrace with sunlight and sea water.
I remembered this when reading her name. Soto. Add a 't' and the emphasis falls down.
Subtract the first 'o'. Then we know what she did, and it doesn't matter it's missing a letter.
Hide, stow, fall. Quiet words, they only want to keep small hearts breathing in the dark.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Victoria.

 Victoria.
The queen across the water or the hand holding you up while you learn to tread water,
she knew how to keep a secret. She knew what to say, the time then nearly up.
Over there, through the wrong window: love made into a woman suddenly falling down.
In closets, in cabinets: minds trying to believe good prevails, even trapped in the dark.
They try to remember how to spell words seeded in desperate magic, falling shy one letter.

Agents felled in the line of duty get stars. I would rather name one for her, love letter
to a woman I never knew through a handshake and didn't need to. I know Victoria.
Lifetimes ago, she was marked by a half moon, a searchlight circling in the dark.
She reflected its sky in arcs, not the stone but the ripples rearranging blue water,
rearranging light. Explanations exist but fall short. Some truths get written down
a hundred ways and none of them come close. But I feel I knew her: out, away, up.
 
Maps don't account for the geography here, the tendency of some up
then downward travels repeatedly represented by the wrong face, a letter
left in the wrong hands, or a life cut out too soon. Again I write her name down:
Victoria.
Again it isn't enough. Loss of a stranger is dangerous water
and I don't know how to swim anyway, but here I try: ocean bright or sky dark.
 
I don't want to lie, to pretend I knew her favorite movie or song to listen to in the dark.
But I still feel I knew her other ways, feel that anyone with hands thrown up
to catch hearts, to bring them home - anyone who has done this, knew her: the land or the water
carrying small bodies to safety. Names have power but not names alone, not the letter
written to her family because we are helpless to do anything else for Victoria.
We say we won't forget but when it's our turn, all we can say is at least it's been put down
 
in this way too, in any way we can, while someone else out there does it better (we hope.) Down
beneath our ages and actions, we strike fires much the same, chasing off the dark
the only ways we know how: by those routes, roots we don't have words for, for Victoria,
for lives lost and saved in the same shaking breath. "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
the magic word, the invisible armor, the stronger body bearing its bullet as Morse code, as the letter
which said: love won out, wore strong, walked across the water
 
fear and courage with their arms around each other, whispering "When we grow up
we will remember how it was to be small, helpless, and protected." Inking one last letter
to send where we finally meet for real: the land of sky, giving goodnight kisses to soft water.