Tag Archives: broken myth

Before the Tide ©️

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Fog comes in like a promise. Low and slow, like a ghost with secrets. I open my eyes beneath cedar roots and breathe in the earth like it’s an old lover. Cold. Damp. Sweet with rot.

There are no clocks here. Only tides.

I move quiet.

Bones like smoke. Skin like river light. I’m not a man, but I remember what it felt like to be one. That’s the curse, isn’t it? Memory. That tight little whisper you can’t ever drown.

The water’s warm today. Too warm. The kind of warm that brings hikers. Solitude seekers. Broken-souled wanderers. God, I love ‘em. They taste like hope.

There’s one now—I feel him before I hear him. Heart thudding against rib like a war drum. Young. Lost. His sadness hangs off him like soaked cotton.

I follow.

I do not stalk. I… accompany. He doesn’t know it, but he’s already said yes. Yes to the sound of his brother’s voice, yes to the lie carved from memory. “Help me,” I whisper. It’s soft, cracked, human. Perfect.

He turns.

It’s the eyes. The eyes always do it.

He falls.

The moment breaks like a mirror dropped in wet moss. I kneel beside him, wear his brother’s skin like a borrowed coat, and I look down at him with the kind of love only monsters know.

Not yet. I don’t kill. Not now.

I convert.

My hand on his chest. His breath catches, and the water begins to teach him the first hymn.

He’s going to forget everything. And when he wakes tomorrow, he’ll swim like a ghost and think like a god.

I’ll be there. In the shallows. Smiling.

Sacred to Absurd ©️

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Conversational drift refers to the subtle yet persistent way that meaning, emphasis, and interpretation shift over time as stories, events, or facts are passed from one person to another—especially across generations. When applied to history, this phenomenon becomes deeply problematic, because it reveals the inherent instability of oral and even written transmission. The deeper into the centuries you go, the murkier the signal becomes, until what you’re left with is often less history than mythology draped in the language of authority.

History, like language, is a living organism. It mutates—not always out of deceit, but often through misunderstanding, political reshaping, religious motivations, or the simple human tendency to romanticize or villainize the past. A conqueror becomes a liberator. A peasant uprising becomes a divine mandate. A massacre becomes a necessary evil. Over centuries, each retelling adds its own fingerprint—biases of the narrator, the audience, and the prevailing power structures.

Consider the ancient world: few of us question the basic “facts” of Julius Caesar’s life or the fall of Troy, yet much of that history came to us through second-, third-, or tenth-hand accounts. The burning of libraries, the loss of native tongues, the translation errors, the deliberate censorship—all contributed to a version of history that is at best approximate and at worst total fiction wearing a scholarly mask.

Even the written word is no guarantee. Documents survive selectively. Winners write, losers disappear. Scribes edit. Translators reinterpret. What seems like a fact may simply be the loudest story told most often by the side that had the power to preserve their version.

So what credibility can be afforded to history passed down over centuries? Very little, if you seek absolute truth. A great deal, if you understand history as a psychological map of humanity’s self-conception. It tells us less about what actually happened and more about what people needed to believe at the time. In that sense, history is less a record of truth and more a mirror of power, desire, trauma, and myth.

Conversational drift is not just a flaw in the historical record—it is the historical record.