It's Still Life

Liturgy: The Unmasking of a Beach (Or: Where Water Meets the Wound)

Note: This week, I am trying something completely different with my Six. Not a six sentence story (as usual) but the (anthropomorphic) psychological effects of storm-driven tides on a local beach.

I. The Withdrawal of the Sea
The tide does not come to cleanse.
It comes to unmask,
drawing out the bitter lines worn
so long they learned your shape.

No questions.
No bargains.
It recedes — and takes with it
every whispered I’m fine,
every this is just who I am,
every word branded on your bone.

II. The Marsh Laid Bare
What remains is not ruin,
but origin.

The glistening marsh beneath the story.
The tender mud no mask can grip.

You ask,
If not the salt, then what am I?
And the answer rises slow and cold:
You are something older.
Something soft.
Something still alive beneath the preservation.

III. The Exposure
You built a body of salt.
To dazzle.
To cauterise.
To remain.

…salt deceives.
preserves what can no longer breathe,
burns the wound it’s meant to protect.

When the tide takes it,
it leaves you unfinished,
a shoreline trembling with the possibility
of being something else.

IV. The Reset
True direction lives
not in the armour,
but in the skin beneath it;
wet with remembering.

Be a map
written in fluid and fragment,
routes long abandoned
in the name of survival.

Tides clear as a compass,
and you begin to feel
the direction
you were always pointing.

V. The Reveal
Let yourself be seen
not as polished,
but as possibility.

Forgive the crust you once
wore
as a face.

Stand in the tide.
Let the first draft of your true self
rise from the waterline.

Not salt-born,
but born of the silence that follows
the end of pretending.