The In-Between
In the Lowcountry, the land does not end; it exhales.
There is a stretch of water where the shore cannot decide whether it is land or sea, where marsh blurs the boundary and tides erase footprints as quickly as they are made. It is a place of the in-
between—not arrival, not departure, but the long, humid breath between breaths.
The air is thick with salt, fresh-cut grass, and pluff mud warming beneath a relentless sun.
You hear the storm before you see the signs. Thunder ripples across the sky and dark cloudsgather—slow, deliberate, patient. Sometimes they slide past without touching anything. Other times it rages, tearing through the quiet like something long contained.
You tell yourself it will pass.
You remind yourself that you have weathered worse, that the sky has threatened before and never split open.
They do not care what you have survived. They arrive when they are ready, tear through what you built, and leave you standing in the wreckage trying to remember what the horizon looked
like before everything turned gray.
The marsh moves the way old things move—unhurried but certain. Nothing here rushes. Even decay happens slowly, deliberately, a soft undoing that feeds what comes next.
In a place like this, you learn to read the sky the way other people read faces. You know when to bring the laundry in, when to unplug the television, when to brace your shoulder against a door
that refuses to latch.
What you do not learn is how to read yourself.
There are days I do not know who I am.
Lightning sometimes strikes before thunder has time to ask permission.
The marsh waits for the tide without apology. It rises and falls without explanation.
But the bells at the Methodist church still toll—marking hours I never consented to live through, ringing hymns for days long gone, calling the names of selves I have already buried.
Their sound drifts across the Lowcountry air, over blackwater and sawgrass, over porches where no one sits anymore, over roads that remember every departure.
I stand and listen, unsure whether they summon the child I once was, the woman I became in order to survive, or the stranger I meet in the mirror on mornings when the light feels borrowed.
The marsh does not ask who it is.
It moves.
The marsh does not question its tides.
It yields, then gathers itself again.
Only I linger in the in-between—neither lost nor found, but tolling softly inside my own chest, a bell learning the shape of its own sound.
During what I called reconstruction—though perhaps unraveling is the more honest word—Ibegan to suspect that this was the point all along. Not to understand, but to trust that something
was being born in the dark.
I began to study the trees.
The reeds bend and bow beneath the weight of the seasons they have endured. Their roots grip soil that has washed away a thousand times before. They do not argue with the current. They
guide it, silent and patient.
They are hollowed out, yes, but they do not fall.
Instead, they make homes for creatures that know how to live inside broken spaces.
A tree does not stand because it is whole.
It stands because its roots have memorized the shape of struggle.
The train does not pass through this town.
It claims it.
Its low horn moves through floorboards and bone alike, arriving in that hour when night loosens its grip but morning has not yet taken hold—the hour when the body is most honest about what it
carries.
The train does not care that you are grieving.
It does not care that the heat has turned the sheets into a second skin.
I once believed the train was a way out.
Now I understand it is only a reminder of what stays.
Departures require more than timing. They require permission—from money, from circumstance, from the quiet obligations that root themselves in the chest.
They grow there like sawgrass along the marshwalk: stiff, unyielding, capable of drawing blood if you try to pull them free.
Grief is claimed, too.
It settles into the walls, into the soft places inside resolve, until staying begins to feel less like a choice and more like the only shape a life can hold—even when leaving might have saved you.
They talk about the big ones—the year the ocean swallowed the boardwalk leading to the island, the night lightning split the pine behind the church, the afternoon hail punched holes through tin
roofs like paper.
They tell those stories with pride, as if surviving weather proves something about a person’s worth.
The ones built quietly over years.
Fed by disappointment.
By betrayal.
By the slow erosion of dreams that once felt as solid as the ground beneath your feet.
No debris for neighbors to help you clear.
They leave only silence—
and the long work of learning how to breathe again in the in-between.
It is the betrayal that hurts the most.
The betrayal of dreams once held with certainty.
Hearts broken.
Love lost before it had the chance to fully become what it promised.
No one tells the marsh to stop missing the tide.
How, then, can my heart stop missing the dreams it once recognized as its own?
The marsh does not protest when the tide eases back toward the sea. It simply yields, letting the water slip away through the grass and mud, carrying with it the quiet evidence that it was ever there at all.
My life has done much the same.
Hopes and dreams once stood before me as steady as the shoreline. Then, almost without warning, they rolled away like receding water—gone before I had the chance to understand their leaving.
The marsh knows this rhythm.
It does not chase the tide.
It waits.
And somewhere in that patient waiting lies a truth I am only beginning to understand: not everything that leaves is lost forever. Some things are simply learning the long way back.
But it is we who must accept that there may never be a way back.
We must learn to live without the pull of the tide, without the gentle sway of the marsh, without the winds that once carried us toward the promise of change.
Like the heron standing motionless in the shallows, watching the water with a patience older than memory. Like the egret that waits quietly for the minnows to pass before it strikes.
They do not mistake stillness for absence.
They know the water is always moving—even when it looks like it has gone.
I am still learning that.
Still learning that not everything that leaves is meant to return.
Still learning that some things do not come back—
not the tide,
not the life I thought I was building,
not the person I was when I believed it would hold.
The marsh does not grieve what it has already released.
It opens again.
It always opens again.
And maybe that is the only way through this—
not to find myself,
but to become someone
who knows how to remain
when everything else has gone.
After/Thought Literary 