The Maiden of the Surf

O Muse be with me, and let my words be true. Abandon me not, who calls with faith upon you. Take my readers on an adventure — they deserve it after a week’s long toil — and make of me thus your instrument for amusement.

My friends…

As a youth, I dreamt—

But not as other youths do. I did not dream of conquest, nor of fame, nor of golden halls where men raise goblets in triumph.A close companion of ruddy-faced Eros, I dreamt of a woman I had never seen in my life, utterly majestic in form.

Her skin was olive-kissed, sun-warmed, and brushed three times by the fading gold of a summer’s dusk—not the garish bronze of prideful myths, but that living earth-tone of origin and return. A complexion that seemed to hum with the memory of first gardens and the dust of ages long settled. Hephaestus himself, cleverest of smiths, would struggle to capture its likeness within his forge in my father’s home of Neapolis.

And friends, her hair—ah, her hair. Not black like ink, but black like the unknowable.
So black that it mocked shadow. It did not reflect light—it drank it,a s though each strand were an invitation into cosmic disappearance. Was it a black hole? A portal of Chaos, that primordial trickster?Or simply the doorway I had always longed for?

I cannot say. All I know is that looking upon it made me ache to be lost in it forever. To run my fingers through it like a musician gone mad with Orphic inspiration — to find in those locks of her all meaning of prose, all meaning in this one with the form like a thornless rose.

Her skin glistened—not with human sweat,but with something older, something untamed.It shimmered like oil upon the water, yet smelled of something sweeter, darker, heavier than nectar.

It may have been ambrosia, but I suspect it was Nyx’s breath, caught in droplets and scattered upon her skin. It was a scent that would drive Dionysus to frenzy,
that would make Apollo forget his lyre and war-chariot both. But I—being only a youth—did not desire to possess her. I simply watched, entranced, as she danced beside me in the surf, waves tugging at her thighs as though Poseidon's own hand could not help but caress her.

She smiled. And that smile— my friends, I tell you that it was not mortal.

That smile could burn Aphrodite’s pride to ash.
That smile could make Athena rewrite her iron codes of modesty.
That smile could make Hera, ever brittle and threatened by joy,
explode into madness at the sheer purity of wanton poetic bliss.

She spoke nothing. Not one word. And yet she communicated entire tracts and secret wisdom with the flicker of an eye. Almond-shaped, her eyes were of emerald green—
not the sharp green of envy or youth, but the deep forest-green of enduring mystery.

They were Eurydice’s glance before the parting, and Artemis’s rare intimacy all at once. No lyric I have ever penned has captured what passed between us in silence. She needed no language. She was language.

Then—as waves lapped around us like serpents of salt and moonlight, she turned her head—not toward me, but toward the deep. The ocean I loved, always so mysterious —yet she was not taken. She was called. Lord Poseidon summoned her—not with rage or force,but with familiarity. As though he were calling one of his own.

And she heeded—not like one chained, but like one who belongs equally to the sea and the stars. And as she receded, not with haste but with ritual grace, my heart remained broken open upon the sand when I made the shore, no doubt watched by mermaids who delight in the misery of mortals that pollute their home with death and destruction.

Not even Odysseus, stranded on Circe’s beach, could have known such severing. Nor Achilles, grieving beside the pyre of Patroclus, could have felt this particular wound—a vanishing wound that leaves no blood, only the ache of absence, and the ghostly blur of a woman who once stood before me as though conjured from myth and morning.

She was there, and then she was not. Where she had been, the world remained unchanged—but I had changed. Changed forever. That is the cruelty of such meetings. Thus began my life’s search—not for her, perhaps, but for the echo she left behind. A search that embedded itself in every labor, from the smallest trembling sonnet to the sprawling, salt-stained epics whose endings always circled back to her.

And now I sit—quiet, weathered, and a little content despite it all — for at last I know where she is, who is so dear to me. My tunic of green and white drinks in the last warmth of the sun. Helios descends slowly, gilding the world’s edge with gold. The sky above melts from soft blue to molten amber, and the sea before me shimmers like the beginning of a dream I once had and never quite awoke from.

Kalinifta, my muse.