The Silent Veil
Veils often breathe in silence.
She resides between the moon and its shadow, her figure unraveling beneath the trapped light. She is beauty stripped to her bare bones. The air is forever cerulean, and the seascape is endless. Solitude curls against her skin like molten and grain.
Under the fabric, there lies no audience, only the echo of the earth’s beginning.
Light falls into the folds of her body, and time melts slowly. In such stillness, her identity is redrawn. Her body never wilts from the glare of the moon; she is reborn through it. She is the ghost in the dark and a woman made from warmth.
Like a dreamy cloth drifting across water, our fears and desires move through us in slow, luminous currents. They remain incarnate. Our thoughts mold together, as every pulse is water and every idea is a ripple across the skin of being.
The tides whisper her name in fragments, carrying pieces of her through the night. She moves like a quiet omen, soft as a thought that has not yet chosen its shape. The veil shifts with her breathing, rising and falling like a small pearl caught in an orb. The earth learns her outline in real time with every step she takes. There is no rush or demand. Even the wind keeps its distance, afraid to disturb the fragility of her emotions forming around her.
In this solitude, she becomes the version of herself that light remembers. The veiled figure moves the way a whisper travels across an empty room. The air around her hums. Light clings to her fabric like something otherworldly, turning her outline hazy and liminal. The layers of airy cloth blur into one another until she seems less human and more like a passing apparition. A breath wrapped in translucent cloth. A presence held together by threads and longing.
In this quiet unreality, her identity begins to unspool and reweave itself.
Not with urgency.
Not with pain.
But the way fog curls around a waking landscape.
Her hidden face becomes a symbol of every quiet truth we never speak. The gentle drapes of fabric mimic the weight of thoughts that drift in and out. Even small gestures feel dreamlike, as if she is moving through a world underwater. And somewhere within that fluid tension, something new stirs. A shape rising from the depths. We all unconsciously flow into one another, dissolving discrepancies between resilience and fragility.
The boundaries we once clung to, like our skin and name, all get carried away by the rip of the current, leaving only the core of movement. In this timeless tide of humanity, the identity of self is spongy. Our minds have always been vessels molded by the passages of everyone we meet, touch, and smell. Desire carves channels for fear to travel, until both are indistinguishable from one another. We are alive and becoming, and in this form, fear and desire have never been enemies, but have been the fabrics that sculpt us into our true forms.
Strike Out,
Digital Director: Jordan McAvin
Assisted by: Kristen Barnwell, Sophia Kelbert
Digital Staffers: Lauren Lee, Olivia Hill, Victoria Scriven
Model: Tiana Cole
Beauty: Marlena Trudnak
Styling: Isabela Jahnes, Katherine Davis, Daniella Acosta, Camille Marshall, Elsie Warwick, Jennifer Mai
Photography: Jackson Tessmer, Hannah Tranle
Videography: Katelyn Wexler, Chris Lopez
Writing: Kavya Akkiraju
Editors: Daniela Mendoza, Dani Hernandez
Tallahassee