Petrifaction

It flows over him like a whisper, gentle, barely audible, filling him, though he does not notice it.

What he feels is a tingle upon his skin, the sea, infinitesimal. He takes it deep inside with every breath.

“This is also me” he thinks and the water ripples a response, mineral light glistening on the waves.

“It was always so” it says.

Spray, turquoise and crystalline, hovers in the air then dissipates to nothing. He shivers when he sees it evaporate and pulls his cloak tight.

“I have the certainty of this” he thinks “the certainty of solidity.”

And the sea sighs.

“What is it you know?”

And he could speak of the sky, explain the blue. He could count the striations of rock and mountain and re-tell the history of all things. He could harness the power of wind and wave and throw the miracle of light into the darkness.

“But this is not me” he thinks.

“Then there must be some other truth” says the sea.

So he stands and waits, imagining the things he knows, the things he feels.

Petrifaction

And he feels a shift, the mountains on the far shore falling away to reveal neither dark nor light.

“All things change” they tell him though their words are soundless.

“And so I must become a piece of it.”

He shrugs off his cloak and all the certainties that restrict him and stands naked before the world.

Feels blood oxidise, bone mineralise, particles diffuse, congeal. What flows into the rock is but a piece of him, a merging of things, nothing more.

He will stand perhaps a thousand years and look out across those shores, remembering the many ways of being. Knowing as he hardens that erosion has already begun.