You mapped yourself in salt and starlight,
Tracing the curve of Cassiopeia’s W
Against the hollow of your collarbone,
While below, the Atlantic pulls back
Its dark hem, exposing periwinkles
Clinging to granite like small prayers.
It is the twenty-seventh.
Tonight you are the space between high tide at 11:47 PM,
And the moment Polaris shifts
One degree closer to the true north
You’ve never been.
Our reflection fractures in tide pools —
Seven different selves in seven different mirrors of
Seawater, each one holding a different story:
The child who collected moon snails
In a red plastic bucket,
The teenager who carved initials into driftwood that washed away,
Grouped in flocks to try and drown
The loneliness.
The deity who stands,
Now with sand filling the spaces between your toes
Like hours between certainties.
You are the constellation that ancient Greeks called The Wanderer—
Not because you move
But because you contain multitudes of light
Separated by such vast darkness that astronomers mistake you
For separate stars entirely.
The doctors called it Bipolar Disorder.
Your edges ebb and flow
Like the horseshoe crabs
That emerge only during
The highest tides of summer,
Ancient and faithful to rhythms older
Than naming, older than the need to
Call yourself anything at all.
Watch how Orion rises differently
in January than in October—
Same stars, same hunter,
But tilted toward a different prey.This is how you love:
Seasonally, predictably,
Yet somehow always
Catching yourself by surprise.
He loved too little.
You love too much.
The lighthouse at Dondra Head
Sweeps its beam across the water
Every six seconds,
Illuminating the same rocks
But never the same wave twice.
You practiced this constancy— this returning and releasing,
This faithful revolution around
Your own uncertain center.
You cling to me, soft skin,
Against my own shredded wrists.
At 2 AM, when the moon pulls
The tide so far out
That you can walk to islands
That don’t exist at noon,
You discover new territories of yourself:
The peninsula of your loneliness,
The archipelago of your fears,
The single footbridge connecting who you were
To who you’re becoming.
By dawn, the water returns,
Covering your tracks
But not erasing them—
They’re still there
Beneath the incoming surge,
Pressed into sand
Like fossil evidence
Of your temporary certainty.
You are both the fixed point
Foreigners point to at the horizon,
And the moving water,
Both the lighthouse keeper and
The ship seeking consolidation.
In this liminal hour
Between night tide and morning,You practice the difficult art
Of being multiple,
Of disappearing,
Of changing completely,
While remaining
Recognizably,
Unmistakably,
you.
– Akshara Dayawansha –
