Strong Water

I turned the kettle on and let it scream.

The body lists toward a sea that isn't there - I know this. The doctor called it landsickness, said the brain torques itself around the bad thing like a hand tightening on a banister it doesn't trust.

So I go dark.

Not the dark of nothing. The dark of iodine staining the skylight amber, the dark of silver that won't stop reacting to the air in the room, the dark of a man sitting in cold water at five in the morning because the shock is the only honest thing left.

Old certainties have fallen away. The shelves I labelled - Tuna and Nuts, Breakfast Items, Soup - the labels peeled or curled and I didn't replace them. What's the point of naming what you won't eat in a house that doesn't settle?

But here's what the silver taught me: it stays in a state of exposure. It doesn't fix. It keeps receiving. And the chant that comes up from the soil - not a word I know, not a language - just the sound of something that mends because it keeps going.

I will stay till the settling comes.

Not the settled. The settling. The verb, not the noun. The process, not the result. The water still moving after the splash, the Reynolds number high enough to make it tall, the Weber number high enough to make it messy, and me in the middle of it, someone entirely new, a black dog, a broken heart, reveling in the dark because the dark is where the light waits patiently.

The sky was orange when I arrived. It will be orange when I leave.