And from across the bay she gazed, open, drained, eyes red and lost;
they had left her yesterday.
They had for the first time met Life,
they had seen her truths for the lies they were.

On her damp chest, her hand laid quivering
over her paper skin and toothpick bones,
her heart too weak for the inhuman things it felt.
The sun was a blood orange
suspended over an expanse of beige,
with small rocks embedded in the cool morning sand.
A lazy wave crawled to her naked feet,
foaming languidly as it licked her toes.

Those eyes tried to lift themselves.
They tilted her head up with them,
the hot forehead and bagged eyes and still mouth.
They had lost all their tears. There comes a point
when the fervidness of realization subsides,
the rain stops coming but the questions linger.
They watched the peacefully sputtering water,
moving as if in a time loop,
unfaltering, strong, before a broken soul.
They closed, and saw the red sun through her eyelids.
They liked how this felt, the expanse that was the sun lessened to nothing.
That unearthly hue,
that mix of celestial brightness and common flesh.
What a privilege it was for humans
to rely on such a fantastic thing that they had not made with their own hands,
or found of nature, exploited, and ruined.
The sun is the only such thing.

They opened.
They were pulsating very slightly, but were almost stable now.
They saw the sand,
and the long weeds,
and the metronome of the stream,
all gilded by the sun,
which brought out their every breath and essence.

Nature was like this,
pretty even in its revelation.
So humans, she reasoned,
must be of a different class.