2025 Autumn Parcel: What the Sea Remembers

The wind has shifted.

You notice it first in the way the air brushes your cheek—cooler now, scented faintly with salt, moss, and something older still. Leaves rustle outside your cottage window, casting flickering shadows across the page. You blink. Were you reading... or remembering?

A kettle whistles behind you, but you hesitate to rise. Because just now, the tide whispered your name.

You feel it—the hush of waves in your chest, the slow pull toward the sea. Footprints you don’t recall leaving trail across the sand. A letter, sealed and sea-stained, rests on the windowsill. You didn’t place it there.

Something is returning.

And with it, a story long buried in fog—never truly forgotten.

You step outside.

The wind arrives before you see the sea—cool and certain, full of salt and sorrow. It whispers your name in a language you almost remember. Somewhere in the distance, gulls cry like ghosts, and waves press against the cliffs with the weight of stories too old to be spoken aloud.

Heather brushes your bare feet, soft and wild. Mist curls low across the earth like breath. Down the hill, a single light flickers in a cottage window—steady, golden, impossibly familiar.

The air smells of salt and rosemary, as though someone lit a candle just moments ago, as though they expected your return.

And there, between the stones and seafoam, you see her.

Cloak lifted in the breeze. Hair unbound. A woman made of tide and land, her gaze fixed on something beyond the horizon…or perhaps on you.