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The sea needs a storm
2026-07-05
It's easy to see the beauty in storms from safe harbor, and easy to mourn a snowless winter with a well stocked hearth, but even so...
Having frozen to the marrow weathering a winter tempest, I can't help but admire their undiscerning ferocity. The violence without malice. It raises mountains and splits the sky, before relenting so completely you'd think it a foul dream. It's much easier to appreciate now, with roots and a roof over my head, but impossible to feel the rawness of it.
Caught in a storm, you are cupped in the hands of a giant. It's merest twitch tilts the world, pointing the prow skyward before a dizzying crash back to the surf. Yet you know this to be the gentlest of treatment, the merest friction of a brush with a leviathan. Your fate is adrift, out of your hands. This never felt like a cruelty of the sea, just a fact of life laid bare.
The only place I ever felt cruelty was in the eye, and looking back I reckon I invented it by my beholding. Unearthly calm: a brief respite leaves the mind idle to fear. I painted horrors for myself in the deep, but if I sift through my panicked half-memories, the only solid detail that remains is the calm. Never have I seen such eternal, depthless calm as those eyes. I stopped my scrambling then, leaks left unpatched and bilge unpumped, for I knew myself to be dead. I don't know if it was a spell cast over me, or just good sense, but I knew it deeper than my own true name. I'm still surprised at every breath I take. I thought it cruelty, a cat playing with its prey, but now I see that's giving me too much weight. The waves crash and boil whether or not they have a ship to chew. The eyes were not those of a hunter, they were devoid of hunger, inevitable as the tide.
I don't know that I'll see another snowfall, not at my age, but I know I will never see that calm again. I don't wish those eyes one anyone, but I would be greived to know them gone for good. The sea needs a storm.
new outlinks: a leviathan (56), unearthly calm (98), true name (212)