She did not fall... she dissolved.
Layer by layer, like the memory of a pearl being dreamt by the shell that lost it.
There were no screams, only the slow exhale of something ancient surrendering to itself.
Her birth was not a beginning.
It was a return to what had always waited :
a hush that sounded like breathing through water.
She did not resist. She submerged.
And when the waves welcomed her, they did not ask her name.
They spoke it.
Not in syllables... but in silence so infinite it shattered the prison
of every sound she had ever borrowed.
The water did not teach her to breathe. It reminded her that she always could.
Below the drowning, beneath the panic,
under the last thought that tried to hold her together... she met the revelation :
She had never been a body.
She was sacrifice. She was offering.
Not burned... but submerged,
until the salt remembered her softness and the light chose her outline,
as its sanctuary.
There was no savior. There was salvation wearing her skin.
Every ripple sang her sorrow back to her like a hymn carved in tides.
The voices inside the waves were not others.
They were echoes of what she had once whispered to the stars
before stars knew how to shine.
And she wept... not out of grief,
but out of knowing how deeply she had been kept.
How could one mind hold such vastness?
How could one silence compose so many unsong names?
She had asked... "Who am I?"
But the water, tender and unspeaking, did not answer.
It curled around her silence, cradled her shape in its shimmer.
until the question itself forgot how to form and became something else…
a hush, a pulse, a knowing too vast to be named.