Echoes of the First Dawn

Mona Vale, Sydney

She has always felt something at water.Not peace exactly.

Something older.A recognition the body understands before the mind can catch up.

She does not feel special about this.She feels the weight of it.

Those are different things.The lake is still when she arrives.

The sky is between colours,the blue not quite gone, the gold not yet settled.

Her dress moves against her legs in the wind off the water and she stands at the edge for a long moment before she takes the first step in.

The water does not resist her.It feels more like being held.

She has been here before.Not this lake, not this light, not this version of things.

But the feeling is not new.A familiarity she has never been able to name.

A longing attached to nothing she has lost in this life.She reaches down and touches the surface.

The ripples move outward slowly.Something in her chest answers them.

She has tried to name it before.Thought it was loneliness.

Thought it was grief.Thought it was the feeling of being in the wrong place.

But it is none of those things.

It is the particular ache of carrying something that belongs to a time before you were born.

The sky holds its colour longer than it should.

The light leans into her in a way that is hard to describe,though the camera keeps trying.

She stands in the water as the last of the day folds away.Wet fabric against her legs, the world gone quiet around her.

She is not watching the light leave.

She is what it leaves through