~
The girl sits on her small bed, a little island in he midst of clashing surfaces, ice breaking, big chunks of it dropping into the current with giant noises that form a permanent note. That note reverberates in the girl’s head and tells her, with every crack and noise that is attached, to be alert. To remain alert. She is surrounded solely by a shiny thin paper wall as protection, a wall so thin that it cannot be trusted; and what if that, too, breaks? From past experiences she knows that the wall had been even thinner, and did not break. That the chunks of ice had been ten times her size, crashing into the flood and splashing icy water all around her body with the roaring ancient sound of fear. Fear.
The girl stops in her thought, looking up, like something familiar has touched her. A finger tapping her shoulder, saying: remember, remember how we managed to let that ice melt before? How we discovered the fear, took it by the hand and led it out into the open? Remember?
The girl remembers, and half recognises the fear, and all its companions whose job it is to disguise it: fury, disappointment, rage, sadness, indecision, confusion. She remembers - but her body does not remember, yet.
A noise is a noise. Nothing bigger. But is it? A drop of water grows in her head and becomes a flood. Someone pushing a chair back on the marble floor, a train, seerhing endlessly on iron tracks. An old man’s harmless conversation turns into a base drum, hammering inside her. And you say it is just noises?

She thinks of a ship in a storm whose captain, in spite of the house high waves, tries to remain quiet, feet on the planks, but breathing heavily. It is a pointless effort, for as long as the sea is moving like it does, she ship itself cannot be still.

As long as her world is shaking, she herself cannot be still. And how is something solid being formed? From experience? In ancient times, when all the ice was cracking anyways and when no-one was at home nowhere, yet, things must have started at some point. But she wasn’t there yet. She has no experience of that; and yet she does.

And now she remembers. She remembers the sleek, grey, round stone in the center of herself, or what is the imagined center, and how she described it to someone. How that stone in the center seemingly comes from nowhere and everywhere, how it promises to hold the strings together, how not to let things fall apart, for it is the job of a center to hold everything together, for sure. And her head bombards her with messages of doubt, with fearful paranoia, with all the repeated phrases that she knows so well. And her body, still altert, tries to send an army of ants through her veins and backwards, to pass through her arteries and warn her. It orders her fingers to fake numbness, her knees to remain soft and trembling, her skin to cool down to an inappropriate temperature. Her ears tell her they still cannot decode the noises, the indefinite stream, the waves and ice and…

The girl rises. The only thing she sees now is the stone in the center. The one that has been tapping her shoulder, that has whispered to her all the time, we can make it. We made it before, remember? You are scared.

Only the stone. And then she forwards the urgent requests of her head, hands, knees, skin and ears to the stone, too. And the stone, being what it is and always has been, remains and cools down the nervous requestors.

Far away a captain looks around, wet and exhausted, and realises that the storm has passed and that, now, the ship is his, again.