The Wound

You wake with rust on your tongue. You have always woken with rust on your tongue. The dunes repeat to every horizon. Everyone you know drinks from the oasis and calls it enough. For years, you do too. You kneel at the water's edge, cup your hands, and drink. The water is warm. It slides down your throat. Your stomach fills, but the hollow below your stomach stays empty – the basin worn into stone by water that has never come. Some nights, the hollow hums – a note pitched at the basement of hearing. You have told no one. But every morning, there it is: rust on the tongue. The hollow's only way of reaching your mouth. You were taught to see this ache as sickness – something to bury, pray away. Then one dawn, a wind crosses your face: salt-wet and cold. You stop. You stand frozen on the dune, face tilted into the wind, and the hollow answers. The same note. Answered. This thirst is the shape of water you have not yet found. It is the memory of the ocean, carried on dry wind. Anamnesis: the unforgetting. The soul remembering what it was made for.

The Path

You stand on the dune, face wet with salt wind. The old life waits behind you. You can drink from the oasis every morning for the rest of your life. It will keep you breathing. It will not keep you alive. Your stomach pulls towards the water. The hollow pulls away. You stand at the edge, shaking. You do not drink. Some mornings you cannot move. The hollow whispers that it lied, that there is no ocean, that you have walked away from the only water that exists. You get up anyway. Your lips crack. Your tongue forgets moisture. A voice calls from somewhere behind you. You raise your hand without turning. The sand gives way to rock. The air thickens with salt. You hear it before you see it, see it before you believe. Then your knees hit stone, and the sound swallows you. The hollow goes quiet. You open your mouth, and the salt enters like recognition. The rust dissolves. The stone has met the water it always knew.

The Shadow

The Circling Pilgrim looks out at the dunes, at the haze where sky meets sand, and a thought falls through him like cool water: What if there is no ocean? What if the hollow is the sickness? His shoulders loosen. He digs a pit at dusk – deep enough to block the wind and stop the horizon from pulling. He curls into it, presses his lips to dry grit, tells himself this is drinking. By dawn the stillness is unbearable. He runs towards the first shimmer he sees, arrives gasping, finds only sand. By nightfall he is digging again. This is his rhythm: numb, then frantic, then numb. The hollow screaming, the hollow muffled, the hollow screaming again. He moves. He rests. Surely that is enough. They find him years later, ten paces from a pit he'd dug the night before. His footprints spiral around it like a prayer circling itself. The sea was three days east. He had been circling for months. The thirst that could have led him home died somewhere in the rhythm. You know him. He sleeps in your stillness and runs in your panic. He circles in you still.

The Cut