Please note: I do not own Dutchy. Everything else is mine. Hmmm…never done a disclaimer like that before. Usually it's more of a "I own ____. Everything else is not mine" kind of thing. I like this one better.
The waves are gray now. They lash at the sides of the boat, trying in vain to disturb this thing of misery that makes its way across the ocean. Time and time again they crash into it, angry and passionate, suicidal, trying and failing to rid the water of this thing that remains so stoically unmoved in its tragic journey.
Why must I go back? I had a life in America, and a family. There is hope there, however sparse it is.
He didn't come. He didn't see me, didn't try to see me. They took me past where he was selling that day. It was like he'd never even known me.
I always said I'd come back one day. I didn't mean it, though. But a promise made is a promise kept, as my mother used to say. One way or another.
The waves have given up now, like everyone on this boat. I can no longer see the land, only the waves that make their tired way for this vessel of fate.
I wish I could stay here, suspended between time and place and life. Never reaching one shore or another, always surrounded by the rolling gray waves and the still gray sky. And sometimes, it is the sky that moves, and the waves that are frozen, like clouded, troubled gray glass. And here, surrounded, isolated, by gray, I can believe that this is everything, and that I will remain for all of eternity, here where everything is peace and mystery, and where tomorrow is not another day.
And soon there will no longer be a boat, and its miserable cargo, and everything will be swallowed by the rolling gray sky and the slow, calm gray waves.