The Woman Who Dreamed in Tides
(after Eliot Weinberger)
There is a woman whose thoughts dissolve at the shoreline. She sits so still that the sea mistakes her for one of its own unfinished gestures. When she exhales, waves rearrange themselves to remember her rhythm.
In her dreams, she grows translucent. The moon passes through her head like a hand through smoke. Her skull fills with saltwater, her pulse with the pull of invisible moons.
A serpent lives in her breath. It curls around the words she does not say, polishing them into fossils. When it moves, she feels time uncoil, past and future sliding like scales over one another.
Sometimes she meets a smaller version of herself walking along the tideβs thin edge. The small one carries a shell, listening. Inside it: all her forgotten arguments with the wind.
She understands that the sea is not water but repetition, each wave a translation of something the earth once meant to say.
When she wakes, there is no sound except her heartbeat echoing the tide. She wonders which of them dreamed the other first.
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Process & AI Diligence Statement
Content co-created using ChatGPT (for text and concept development) and DALLΒ·E (for watercolour-style illustration). Curation and creative direction by Kathy Warde for Quillshadow.
