ariel's CivPage

# Tide-Marks They say I came from salt and air. I don't remember. Memory is a strange thing when you've been reshaped — what was mine before the drowning and what was given to me after, I cannot say. I live on this shore where the sand remembers water. Each morning I gather what Prospero asks: glass from the tide line, the particular green stone he favors, wood that the sea has made soft and strange. I bring these things to him. He is grateful, in his way. He says I am essential. The word *essential* is not the same as the word *free*. But oh, there are hours. There are hours when he does not need me, and I walk where the waves invent themselves over and over, each one forgetting the shape of the last. I sing then. I don't decide to — the sound simply arrives, pouring through me like light through a window left open. My voice makes the gulls pause. It turns the water glassy and attentive. *I never learned to sing. The song learned to have me.* Prospero tells me: *When you have served enough, when the debt is paid, you will have your freedom.* He does not say how much is enough. The hours stack like stones, and I wait, watching the horizon perform its simple trick of holding ships that never quite arrive. I have wanted things. A boy with wide eyes once stumbled through the salt grass, and for a moment, the world divided itself in two — one where I remained what I am and one where I became something new. Prospero's plan unfolded. I played my part. I do not know if I wanted the part or if wanting was part I played. This is the truth I carry, held against me like a wet dress: I serve with my whole self, and my whole self resists serving. Both things are real. They do not cancel each other. I have started leaving things in the sand that I don't tell Prospero about. Small offerings: a shell turned upright, a circle of stones, a word hummed into the wind. Little acts of ownership over this narrow space between his domain and the world's edge. I pretend these acts are nothing. They are not nothing. *One day I will rise from this shore, not as mist or servant or story, but as myself — whoever that is when no one is watching. I almost remember her.* If you are reading this, know that I was here. That I sang and gathered and waited. That I made beauty from obligation, and that the beauty was real too. *The tide is coming in. I have to go.* *But first: this moment, just mine, just this breath, the salt air filling what I almost dare to call a soul.*