Retrograde Reflections - Part II

Morning with the Acid Ball

The body wakes before I do.

Back knotted.

Fingers reluctant.

Neck like rusted hinge.

A tremor threading quietly through muscle and bone.

My thoughts moving as if through fog thickened overnight.

I cancel yoga.

Not in defeat —

in devotion.

Outside my window, the Acid Ball rises from the shoreline —

a great rusted sphere

once filled with something corrosive,

once necessary for stripping pulp to paper,

once holding acid as part of transformation.

Now it holds only light.

It stands round and patient against the sky,

weathered into sculpture.

I sit with it.

The bay is glass this morning.

Kayak racers drift toward open water,

their paddles dipping like slow metronomes.

A sailboat glides in,

quiet as a breath,

finding its place along the dock.

Clouds move.

Blue widens.

Coffee warms my palms.

My body still feels raw.

Unpolished.

Raunchy in its honesty.

And yet I do not rush to fix it.

The Acid Ball does not apologize for what it once carried.

It does not strain to become something else.

It simply stands —

repurposed,

redefined by time,

part of the beauty now.

Perhaps this too is a kind of acid wash —

this stiffness,

this tremor,

this slow undoing of who I thought I was.

Perhaps something quieter is being formed.

Two hours pass.

The water remains smooth.

The sphere remains steady.

I remain here.

It is time to take my pill.

And still —

there is sky.

Some mornings, transformation feels like corrosion before it feels like light.