The ocean stretched out past the realm of consciousness, her black waters a carpet of liquid obsidian. The man sat in silence. His aging mind host to distant memories blurred together like the days between the seasons. The sky bled hues of oil pastel as the weary sun took its final breath before retiring to its bed beneath the horizon. The man sat in silence. His eyes but two vagabonds wandering across the eternal horizon, never settling, forever searching; banished exiles severed from conversation with thought. The ocean breeze, chilled by its dance with the chattering tides, swept across the land bearing darkness upon its gentle wings. It ran its spindly fingers through the man's unkempt hair, it whispered the secrets of the universe into his ear but he was deaf to its enticement. The darkness, an impenetrable mist of murkiness, laid siege on the weakening light and soon the world was robed in a heavy blanket of gloom. The man sat in silence. The sea continued to wage its timeless war upon the craggy coast, dispatching onslaughts of waves that pounded selflessly into the stubborn and craggy coast; the shapeless against the unbending. He was the latter and she was the water.
Memories in his mind, ever present, pulsating, begging for an audience; hazy images, paraphrased words, clear emotions. The man closed his eyes and let his wandering mind drift upon the current of recollections. In time he arrived upon the shore of a past episode. The scene was teetering on the edge of midnight, they faced one another at a worn picnic table witnessed by the crescent moon and stars, a captive audience. Just the man and the woman. All other details sanded away by the callused hands of the clock, all details except for the desperate expression etched into her soft feature and the dying embers trapped in her defeated eyes. She held up fragile wrists and cried that she needed an escape, that she was being held hostage by the shoreline. The summer rains washed away the dust but the island would never forget. She told him of sleepless dreams in which she clawed at the formless fingers that constricted her soul. Her past was a legend recited among her peers as folklore of a town's arcane history. She told him she was flying away with the birds at the change of the leaves; she pleaded for him to follow. Frantic eyes grasping for a sign. Her iridescent tears failed to lure a hint of betrayed emotion from his gaze of granite. The man sat in silence; the shapeless against the unbending.
The sigh that escaped from his mouth carried the man from the dreams of yesterday to the present. The steady applause of the waves stayed ever constant, never out of rhythm from the conversation to his isolation. It evened the markings on the sand and the jagged chasms between the isles of memory. The full moon bathed the rippling dunes in silver, the man saw only ashes of grey. Hidden nocturnals chanted his eulogy, this island was his casket, and he sank into Olivia's ashes; further and further.
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