I feel the tide and know my own heart is a reckless moon, my pulse a rogue wave that sweeps and rips at the frayed edges of the world, pressing my own small time into tiny heres and nows and somewhere in the distance, on a red cliff, my name is carved in stone.  Not the name Jillian.  Though that is what you call me.  My other name, the one stamped on the hot surface of my heart, holy and true and blessed.

I am arches, I span, I bridge, I fill a gap.  The waters pass through.  I am a vessel.  I will fall, grind to dust under a thousand starry nights, paint the water red and take to the sky.

I don’t carry much with me.  I lay me down to sleep in a wind bitten wigwam just out of reach of the high water, built of the tired bones of trees.  Good bones.  When I wake at night I think I rest within the ribcage of a whale.  I hear their songs as I sleep, whale songs, like a gale on a frigid winter night passing over the land I came from, the North.  That kind of sound breeds freedom in chained bones, eats away at steel, corrodes hinges and spits rust.  I sleep deep and wake free, all my small, sour, self-imposed penitentiaries melted and fluffed into flotsam and foam.

I lift a hand to my brow to block the gold of the morning sun.  I look down.  I am the black rock in the heart of the surf, wiped clean and slow to fade.  Warm host to the cormorant on sunny days.  Veins of quartz pushing through the hard darkness of my face.  And here.  A nugget of gold.

I lean deep into the drum of the shoreline.  I am drawn to the rhythm and in the closing cadence between the crashing curls of water, I hear a creed.  No, I feel a creed beat its power into my bones, lacing my cells together with an ardent, sterling rope, each wave a new article of faith.

Oh.  I believe.