For a while now, I've had a thought swimming alongside my awareness, a fin cutting the water as I wait for it to save or **** me. Dolphin or shark? It came near enough for me to make out its shape recently.

**** or save? I know at least that it wasn't a fat guy with a prank fin and a snorkel. It closed on me and I realized what is most painfully missing.

When I am touched, it is simply that.

Dreamlike, my finned pursuer still refused to reveal its whole shape to me, and instead became the emotive image of a hand lovingly reaching for my face.

That small act of love is gone.

It means so much to me, that tenderness, that I ruined the last ship I sailed. I tore every beam apart in my search for what was just a three-legged spider deep in her darkest corner. So I burned down the good ship Treble and used the remains to float away.

I drifted to an atoll and chose a meek *******. It would certainly do, what better place to spend my remaining balance of time?

The breezes whispered and wouldn't stop.

Tides eroded and regrew my ******* until the even rhythm became inherently strange. So steady.

Evenly, unknown, eternity.

When the bottle washed up, I jealously guarded it from the *******. I should not have called the ******* Wilson.

Apparently Wilson controlled the weather.

Several gales and at least one hurricane punished my foolish hide. But the bottles kept coming, encouraged by the raging.

Shortly after, I learned to surf.

Well, I wasn't good at it. And Wilson didn't approve. It only took a little inclementation to sweep me away. If Wilson did control the weather, she must have been exhausted by then.

What a flimsy board.

It was my shield, held wearily up against the hungry ocean. Before my encounter with the amorphous beast, I was just drifting, again, unsure what quixotic urge took me so far.

And then the fin arrived.

**** or save?