Picture This: Ostel Bay’s Bright Unfolding

Finally, when at last Cowal’s knotted roads gave up the thread to Ostel Bay, father and daughter stood in a new year’s bright unfolding. On the beach where the sea had receded toward distant peaks and fleeting masterpieces, where light and shadow swooped and swallowed like swifts on summer wings, staring at a trawler bridging nesses of untruths.

The body is a lie. Every word and sensation a falsehood — not in a moralistic sense, in the sense that symbols and experience are sieved through subjective perception. The truth is neither spoken nor heard, never tasted or smelled or felt upon the skin like Argyll’s skirling wind. Truth is the thing imperceptible because it has always existed. I had called it something else, a lie. What lie have you called it?

And here on Kilbride’s threshold watching Arran’s features fade and form, the water’s crusty leavings: Pearls. Every day is a new year’s day. Every day is a birthday. Every day is a deathday. Every day is numbered. Every one a gift, the darkness and the lightness, the tidal unfolding, just so, of a soul through the delta, to the delta.