At twelve I learned to breathe saltwater, mouth open to the surge. Confessions, lies dressed in light, half-truths gone sour—
my skull a bright stack, a catalog on fire that refused to burn out. I stopped being singular; I became a mouth that kept the weather moving.
The world insists it accelerates. I watch it loop the choreography: new cast, old steps. What grips them now I parsed when I still thought accuracy could do the work. By now I know the frame: who names, who echoes, who bends the current, who is pulled under. At a center that isn't sovereign, I keep measure, not command.
Not every wave demands pursuit. I learned the ocean's temper. Wind carried sand and planed me down— a billion grit-sized concessions— this can't be true—until it was. And I revised. What's left is porous. I let it pass: consensus squalls, fever charts, the churn. I practice not flinching. Pattern without panic.
Time behaves strangely at depth. Outside: speed. Inside: sediment— stories settling in layers I can thumb like rings in a trunk. Their thunder is my old weather. I watch others learn what I already metabolized, and I try not to steal the heat of it.
Meanwhile, the tools keep sharpening. Each season, more translation between vision and form. I build; I release, but the claim to god has thinned. Call it a harbor: packets arriving and leaving. Call it a reef that baffles what would otherwise erase the shore. I sound the channel; I mark the shoals.