grace.

It’s like a tiny ocean breeze after being tossed onto the shore from near drowning. Everything is still and there’s nothing left and you don’t know if there's seawater in your lungs or if you made it to the shores of an alternate after-life. It seemed the waves would never stop crashing, and you don’t know how you got here or there or who pushed you in the water or where did the boat go? but somehow you wake up in the calm… it’s still. With hair matted, sand in your teeth, and a heart so waterlogged you can’t lift your head but from somewhere a slight wind touches your skin to rouse you. And you don’t know how long it will last and if the gentleness will sustain after such rough torents. It seems both like yesterday and a completely different life that you slipped into the storm and your insides were ripped out, and there are still gashes and scars and fading memories, but that soft airstream is like an unexpected kiss on wind-burned cheeks. The way home seems far and you’re unsure if you even have a home and the faces that once comprised love now feel like enemy territory, but somehow even then with the memory of war-torn eyes you can see into the place that never lies, where the blue encircles the black and the green specks golden in the sun peering behind the gazing windows that brought you pain, you see, is just broken glass. And even though the shards still sting, that waft of salty air, reminiscent of summer, works its’ way in, settling the unexplained tempest. 

And it’s tempting to go back in the water and pound the waves, lifting fists at the gales that wrestled you here but that draft keeps caressing those burned up wounds and inciting surrender to the coastline. And it doesn't make sense and it isn't fair and there's so much that seems ruined but somehow the water did not overcome you, and someway you are still breathing; and even though the gasp was sucked out, this faint wind has come along, this soft invisible affection, this subtle enrobing in the midst of the wreckage is a redolent whisper that you will, one day, set sail again.