Circles on the Water

“Every ripple begins in silence, yet carries further than the eye can see.”

The cove had grown quieter, though the memory of voices lingered like the aftertaste of summer. A single splash broke the surface, spreading circles out into the stillness, carrying the night’s echoes further than intended. In the distance, laughter rose and fell, as if carried on the wind from a gathering already dissolving into memory. The water revealed what the voices tried to hide, how quickly joy could ripple into unease, how quickly the world reminded you that nothing was ever just surface.

The circles widened, crossing into one another, colliding, breaking apart, reforming. That is how whispers move. That is how truths travel.

Circles widened, one after another,

meeting in silence where voices falter.

Every echo pressed into the cove,

carrying secrets the night could not hold.

What begins in play does not stay contained,

even still water remembers the sounds.

-Kerri-Elizabeth-

But when the next circle broke the surface, it wasn’t laughter that carried with it, it was something else, something no one wanted spoken aloud.

Whispers Beneath the Surface

“What lies unspoken often cuts the deepest.”

The water looked still, but stillness has a way of deceiving. Beneath the surface, a pulse stirred, faint, almost invisible, but alive enough to send ripples across the silence. It wasn’t the kind of ripple you could see in the reflection of the lake; it was the kind you feel in your skin, in the hairs at the back of your neck, in the quickening of your breath when you realize something is there.

Whispers live in places like this. They hide between the cracks of boards on a dock, in the echoes that hang in the rafters of a room, in the way shadows lean farther than they should when the moon stretches them thin. The whispers don’t announce themselves. They don’t ask permission. They linger, and sometimes they take root.

It’s strange how healing can only begin when you stop pretending the whispers aren’t there. For years, you learn to quiet them, to layer silence over silence until it becomes a wall. But silence never silences the truth; it holds it, and held truth always finds a way out.

Tonight, the hold was loud. The whispers pressed harder against the stillness, and there was no denying them. The body knows long before the mind admits it: something is stirring, and it is not done with you.

It might not even be about destruction. Sometimes the truth presses through because it’s desperate to be freed, not because it wants to tear you down, but because it is seeking freedom.

Still, the not knowing can bring its own emotional adventure.

-Kerri-Elizabeth-


What happens when silence can no longer hold what’s buried? When the surface begins to crack, will truth seep gently through, or erupt in a way no one expected?