He was a holy man. He took to church when he ate bread, he took to church when he glanced over his shoulder to the people wed to stacks of societal pledges, he took to church when he read the internet feeds, he took to church when he drove his car, he was a holy and a wicked man.
Did he want to scour and heal, and cure, and use his words over and over, and be so used by his words? He was weary by how the words came to him and watched as the only thing left was a dead holiness that sifted, and fell, and in so doing let him dance from foot to foot. He leant with loyalty to the ground. He was in desolate glee, tears full in their un-becomingness- because they were always present and were manifest without shedding. He had shed and shed, till all was shed.
He was Salt of the Earth.
The scales of musical moments flickered upwards becoming a serpentine sender. Listening, and wanting mutuality a girl in silence spoke, her silent words were a lazy lusting for wonder and paid no heed to the loyalty of those who are unrighteous and true. She ignored the salty steady being and turned upwards to the moon.
Chasing, pining, she emerged wanting to go through and down the steps to the salt mine. To lay herself bare. And in so doing she tore herself in two as she filed for divorce papers from the world as she knew it.
A creature of lunar empty screams that asked for everything.
She entangled herself in an undergrowth of split screens, dysmorphic suggestions; a mirage made of desires, roles and ideas. She was troubled, inert and hungry for salt.
Death’s stone was writ and was slowly tenderly set on its unstoppable steady path. Death’s stoney note was carried by the figure of innocence, treading it’s mountainous trail that though watching, she failed to witness for sake of her nostalgia, for ambition, for the plinth of stars. Desperate for the chance to meet herself she followed the voices and steps that rose in their paradoxical plummet. She continued to be distracted by all that she could not stop, all that continues to happen.
It was fickle yet necessary, paralysing yet tender.
The child reached its place, where death started.
A wind blew through the mountains. Blowing foot hills and peaks and troughs away, there standing, was an egg.
Beings blew through from birth to death, birds erupted to soar and plummet, and she finally saw the gritty, hurt creature that she had thought too ugly to look at before. That she had kept hidden.
Egg cracked, and fried upon the new frontiers, she grew strong enough to see things as they were. And so the world began to betray itself into what was really there. The trails of ambition had become roads carving into “new frontiers”, the road paved by a limited destiny constructed through the conditions of forefathers. “Till death do us part” they said whilst separating land into nations, forming fatherlands through crocodile tears. Thieves decide to stop raiding each other. Drawing their border lines.
She stepped off the path into nothing.
And in this nothing, sand-lands formed, there was a shorefront where she had been as a child.
She finally stopped and laid her body down to rest before the sea. Her body came to a child’s pose, and there she let herself know of her own cruelty, her own joy, that it was not just hers, and she finally lay to rest an exhaustion of wanting to be absolved from life.
Flight stopped, and the sea expanded. She stood by it. Watching and marvelling that these ages keep no score, but are total, playing their dramas across a swirling ebbing, growing and dying space. All that was grotesque that had come before had also been beautiful; it was made from these waters. Memories were not needed if a lesson in history was accepted.
She had been a child before. She could no longer push the world away. She let it all in. She was salty.
Original story and illustrations by Victoria Watson written and created in 2021