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Mar 2015
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?
The cliche about never knowing what is held until it's gone. It's haunting, harrowing, and honest.
Inqhawq
Written by
Inqhawq  United States
(United States)   
1.1k
     ryn, Arlo Disarray and Jamie King
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