Compass
Compass
As I fall through the fog between sleeping and waking, I begin to forget.
Flashes of red. A shower of water and glass. Rainbows and dying lamp wicks. Where was I? Where am I now?
Something's missing. Something I lost long, long ago. Something I fear I'll never recover.
How did I get here?
N: Nowhere
I lie half awake on my bed cover, spread over the sheets with gold in my eyes. Sleep sits on my eyelids, but it begins to dissipate as I blink at the sunset that glances off the stream outside. Sweat dampens my forehead and my back is warm.
How long have I been sleeping? Two hours, perhaps?
Two days? Two lifetimes? What happened in that time?
Lazily I turn to the window but no breeze is blowing, and the sky lies far beyond it. Here I am, imprisoned between marble walls and gilded bedposts, thousands of miles of golden field in every cardinal direction.
I am far; I am nowhere. Sometimes, I feel even the aroma of teas and sunsets never really did anchor me down.
In the evening air, the silken sheets are suffocating; I pull away from them to breathe. A gleam of sunlight catches the seashell on my shelf. The curious item rests content in its place, glassy pale and beautiful—but it bears wounds from ocean storms I've barely read about. I don't know how it came to be here, a treasure of the blue ocean in this dry, golden land.
But I remember something else. On the day I found it, I also lost my paper pinwheel.
The world outside the window is a sea of gold wheat stalks. They sway in brassy waves, broken occasionally by a hewn mill and its lazily twirling water wheel. The stream wanders past the dormice and their meagre grain harvests—towards a vast unknown place far away where all the other rivers, just like itself, converge.
Where do you go, little river?
A seagull squawks from atop the silo. I look up, and understand at once that I'm about to leave.
There is a young woman in my dining hall downstairs this morning. She smiles serenely to herself at our vast arching windows and pillars, quite at home yet not-quite at home. As if my walls weren't made to hold her. Her eyes are captured in the polished tabletop as she sips her tea, gazing through the glass at the gilded fields beyond.
She is unfathomable, I cannot explain it.
I pull the chair and I join her at breakfast; as my gaze crosses her profile, a fleeting remembrance stirs—then is allayed. Amid the rustling of water and stalks, she glances away from the gardens outside, a sigh leaving her. "Don't you ever dream of escape? Don't you tire of this?"
I glance back at her, oddly. "Have we…met before?" I ask, instead, straightening my waistcoat.
The young woman puts the teacup down, then raises her face, tossing an auburn lock away. And I feel my heartbeat fall out of rhythm, for her eyes are ocean-blue.
"Somehow," she replies, smiling softly, like the warm sun on bays in summer. The morning light glows in her eyes. "You make me think of something—some time, long ago. You remind me of the sky…"
She drinks her tea without the milk; how strange.
"The sky?"
Her fingers slip to her pocket, and rising, leaning across the tabletop, she places an old ticket in my hand.
"Yes," she answers in a laugh. "I don't understand it either."
"Come, Cielo. The ship's about to leave."
Suddenly the bells are all around me, awakening me from my sleep in the cold shallows. They sound like the start of the world. A ship has pulled into the estuary, and the call of her horn is foggy in the dew, the melodic chant of its engine. Where, where is this? Dizzy, my lungs flooded with the ocean wind, I lift my feet from the rippling river delta and ascend the cantilevering gangplank to board. She's at the deck, calling for me.
"But where—how—?"
The horn sings again as I stumble on board, and my sailor friend calls again. "It's okay!" she cries out, a smile on her face. All around us, the waves are shimmering blue and deep, and the hull lolls in the tide. "It'll be fun. I promise! You'll love it, Cielo!"
E: Everywhere
Oh, the bays beneath cliffs and the markets on coasts, all joining in the grand symphony! I do not know just when I began to call this ship my home; it sort of snuck up on me, into me, twining itself with my soul. The days trickle past, a fortnight at a time, fading and rising like melted snow in the valleys. All the while the music is playing, scored in the edges of coastlines we verge on our voyage—beaches and bluffs, murky swamps where crabs scuttle through mud.
We are far in the blue, borne by wind, guided only by the compass in my palm. The needle swirls, and I watch as if it were drawing us the entire world with the sweep of its point. But she tells me we have no use of maps: the world is our map, and the waves teach us the routes, and we follow seagulls who show us where their nests are, up the towering cliffs.
Till a few days ago I insisted on cooping myself in the antechamber, so afraid was I to see the churning sea. I ate my fish-and-gruel breakfasts grudgingly in a corner of a cabin floor, scraping my ankles against planks. I slurped up seaweed as if it would cure me. She keeps the gruel in a storeroom downstairs; she caught the fish herself. I complained about the blandness and the bones, and she grinned from the door, and promised spice next time.
But on the twenty-first morning she opened the door and called a blessing—"Happy New Year"—and by the strength granted by her laughter, I found myself rising to go outside.
"Where are we going, Marin?" I ask.
She laughs in reply. "I don't know! Everywhere!"
It's amazing, and I really am an idiot, and I really should have listened to the sailor earlier. Barnacles crust the sea-washed hull. The vessel dances with the tides, and in the empty antechamber, the chandelier is swinging. We pass turning white windmills on the coast, blades swooping through sky, grass carpets unrolling beneath them as if they were kings.
It isn't all good; it is all so harrowing, too. Every day, I trip through the seashell carpet and stumble out the other door head spinning. She often laughs because I'm so easily seasick, patting my shoulder and offering me some fruit-scented wine.
I love the way the sun always knows where it's supposed to go. I align my compass everyday at dawn, and we're both fascinated to find it always emerges from the horizon at the E.
"Where are we going?" I ask her again.
She stares out into the sunset, seeking something. "As far as we can," she replies. "Until we reach the horizon and fall off its edge."
The markets bustle in the harbours. On Sundays, we wave to yachts and tugboats as we pull towards the quay, and their passengers wave back bewildered. We become friends for seconds, before we forget we ever met. Friends in passing. Strangers for the rest of time. I never thought I'd enjoy these crowds, this cacophony—but with her there to tell me what to buy and the scent of spices about, it isn't hard at all.
Chores of the day done, we settle on the deck for an end-of-day game. The sandalwood table between us is decorated like a checkerboard. There are cards in my friend's hand; she deals them for us, and we play a round of fishing.
"I've played too many rounds of solitaire," she says.
Come evening, the light glows rose-red on the salty planks of the deck. I can see my friend through the windows of her room: she unrolls something on the floor, before emptying her bag of junk beside her. Slipping inside, I inquire as to the carpet-like object's purpose.
"It's my tapestry," she exclaims, laughing. "It tells my story. I weave my days into it, and it'll keep growing longer and longer. One day, it'll end—and by then, my entire life will be woven onto it!"
She lifts it to the lamplight, and I stagger at its pungent odour. At the bottom, the woven seaweed looks the freshest—and on its weft, the stars and dandelion clocks seem to glow. "Your story?" I question, eyebrow up in scepticism. "What story?"
She shakes her head. "Dandelions and stars…they are the sky," she whispers back. "It's about you, Cielo; you're part of my story now…"
"Oh." A pause. "And when will your story end?"
She shrugs. "When I arrive at my destination," is her answer. I don't think I know a thing about this destination of which she speaks, but I nod anyway, as if my understanding were permission.
Whenever she docks in a harbour to purchase provisions, she leaves me in charge of her ship. Then I find myself roaming the vast vessel, discovering new rooms downstairs. It's as if there's a part of her she still fears to entrust me with, rooms downstairs that are tangled with all her secrets.
But her smiles seem to invite me, and I supposed it shouldn't matter if she doesn't know, so I go by myself. It is my home too, mine as much as it is hers.
This is how I came to find the secret cabin, deep in the belly of the ship. The things inside glitter in the soft light of a wicker lamp, strange things: rusty anchors, a hundred unused curtains, and ornaments like bells and ribbons that simply don't make sense being there.
How much more there must be—an endless pile of junk that isn't junk at all. It haunts my dreams when I am not there, and I wonder what it means to her, to me. I often think of entering it again, venturing a little deeper—but somehow, I can't seem to find the room anymore.
The nights are the best. When we stand at the deck's edge, the dome of the atmosphere is black about us, and the hull is surrounded by rushing starlit waters. Oh, how romantic, my friend will sigh in the moonlight, laughing as the anchor makes a splash in the fathomless ocean. I want to agree, I do, but I'm ashamed to. Would it do for me to say so?
We light candles on the rails and gaze into the dark below, the wind drawing circles in the water. Cities dot the windswept horizon like fireflies in a dinner queue, but even they are too far away to hear our lively, lonely chatter. The pale bioluminescence swirls on the edges of waves; she takes a camera off its stand in her room, and takes photographs of the patterns.
The months grow long, gradually, questions all tossed away in the dark of night, in which we sit at the deck table and discuss the world we've seen, and the spice and sugar of coasts rests upon her tongue and in the night air. Rivers tend to forget where they began once they've tasted the estuaries. We pull the ship into the harbour of a port city nearby, every night before we fall asleep. Light—gold and yellow and red like the New Year—is painted in streaks across the black waters.
It looks magical, I want to whisper to her, but the words clog my throat. It seems almost taboo to speak, like it might break a spell. I don't know if I want to know; I don't know if she does.
Floating in the sparkling sun of a crescent lagoon, we sort the cards into their suits—diamonds, spades, clubs, hearts. The Ace of Hearts is missing from the deck, so I pull the one in my pocket, the one I keep with me for reasons I do not understand, and lay it down on the tabletop, offering it to her. As if I've always been destined to return it.
"My favourite card," she murmurs, picking it up off the tabletop. I reach out to take it—but with a small grin, she grabs my hand instead, squeezing it gently. "It symbolises love, love in all forms, love in all its futility!"
My heart pounds at her words. Then the wind swells, and she yelps as the ship rocks, sending us falling and scraping our knees on the deck. The gale turns, wailing like a siren—and the ship swerves a second time, careening across the water, tugging at its anchor.
And with a whoosh, our cards flutter from the tabletop. Giving a cry of dismay, she leaps for them; likewise, I scramble under the table as they scatter across the wood, onto the floorboards. But like swifts they swoop off the deck and into the sea. The cards swirl like leaves under the hull, and she yells in sorrow.
Then we return to the table, only for a brilliant golden flash to greet us. A curious seagull has taken the opportunity of the distraction to make away with my compass, and though I cry after it, it refuses to take my orders.
No more perfect sunrises, I suppose.
Three cards were lost—one was the Ace of Hearts. But when I begin my long and profuse apology, she only grins back, ruffling my hair and helping me to stand, with a warm grip.
Something moves within me, like a shoal spiralling through a coral reef. Self-consciously, I smooth my hair down, certain that I have never felt this strange stir in my heart before.
I have, haven't I?
S: Somewhere
I am nothing like who I faintly remember I was. What was I before this voyage?
The golden place, faded to some diluted sepia. She says I am the sky.
Early morning on the antechamber floor, I untangle myself from the old grey blankets and drag my feet to the door.
She's on the other side, smiling at me. Glancing away equally often.
"I have something to show you," she says. Her arms are laden with my seafood breakfast—and somewhat bewildered, somewhat embarrassed at the mess I am, I follow her out onto the deck for our first meal of the day.
"So, Marin...where's it?"
"Somewhere! Follow me!"
I chase her down to the vast engine room, where the machinery chants beneath the shadows, the pistons echoing in their concert hall of iron.
She glances back at me—and oh, the way she twirls, with her gaze raised so high, is breathtaking. She ransacked the lost cabin today, and now the glittering ornaments are piled in her arms.
"Such a dreary place, don't you think?" She laughs.
I do not mention that I have not been this deep in the ship before, this far into a place that has always seemed illegal to enter. I've always thought of it as some sort of secret—like the name of one's greatest demon, or the words that will unravel her. One too dangerous to tell.
Around us, the dials are whirring, tiny clocks that don't follow any known rhythms. Together we soar through the labyrinthine room of steam and pipes, about boilers and under cranks, draping golden silk and ribbons on the pistons and valves. The silver bells and streamers go on the levers and pipes—we're dancing, I see now. This is a joy she never has shown me. We breathe and dance this world to life, chrysanthemum splashes of light blooming on steel and glass.
As evening arrives and the last ribbons slip across the pipes, we sigh in a corner and appraise our work. Almost unnoticed, she draws up close to me—her warmth is hard to ignore. I shift; it's overwhelming me.
The pistons pound. "This...is the heart," she murmurs as we watch. All I can hear is hers.
She turns, and I am lost in the roaring depths of her eyes—blue, blue like the sea, the sea, the sea. The smile fades suddenly from her voice.
"Do you feel it too?" she whispers, touching my wrist without looking. "Cielo, do you feel…the same, this glow of memory?" Her hand has wrapped around my forearm. She draws a breath that leaves as a sigh. "Will you ever leave? But when? Must it end at all? Oh, no, I know it must. But I don't want it to end, Cielo—"
My eyes close, though I never willed them to. It must. I know that without the doubt. I am not of this place; I belong elsewhere. Gold floods the backs of my eyelids—the gold of a picture-perfect wheat field, and a flaming river, dwindling towards the sky…the sky…the sky…
These years, I have felt it growing within me, like a flower waiting to bloom. This strange feeling that she's more to me than I give her credit for.
"Marin, I…"
Thunder.
The ship is rocks beneath us—I lose foothold on the grainy steel and the motion throws me to my knees. She cries out and steadies herself with a metal rail, feet slipping along the floor.
Then it lurches in the opposite direction and gasping, cursing, we grip each other's arms as the shadows grow longer, the high tinkle of wind-chimes echoing down the air vents as the engine continues to chug in laborious defiance…
Thunder.
"The deck," she gasps.
We struggle up the stairs, against the wind. Three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around us, there is nothing. Only churning crests of water, somewhere between blue and grey, endless from where we drift.
No landmarks or bearings. No destination—
"The compass!" she cries to me. I extend empty palms and shake my head. The wind buckles and folds, and the waves toss us against the starboard rails. And she begins to sob, but I know it isn't from pain.
"Lost," she whispers. Her voice is a death knell. "We're lost."
"Marin, don't cry! Let's go below-deck." I take her by the shoulders, and before I know where I'm going, we're halfway to the trapdoor.
The clouds break, and cold needles of rain begin their assault, like bullets of ice. The ship tilts so far that we both know, at once, that it will not survive.
"Below-deck, Marin. We'll be safe there."
Down the corridor we fall, slipping into the darkness of the doorway at the end—it shuts with a familiar click. As she lights her lamp in the blindness of the night, my breath catches. Around us, objects lie strewn across the benches and the floor, thrown into complete disarray, the same as the last time I saw them.
The secret cabin. Why is it here?
"It's my personal storeroom," she says, falling into a beach chair and sighing deeply. "It's like the horizon—you know? Its colours keep changing."
"How's it different from the normal storerooms?"
"It reminds me of how long I've been travelling," she says. "The journey to my destination is taking forever." Puzzlement furrows her brow. "Why haven't I arrived yet? Did I arrive and not realise?" She turns to me, and I feel the question is supposed to be special. "Will I ever arrive?"
Because I don't know the answer, I blink and sigh a little. "I don't know either," I say. "And I'm glad we've been here this long, but I don't know how much longer—how much longer till I must return, and I am nowhere again..."
My eyes have wandered again; there is so much here, too many stories and secrets that will never be told, centuries of history that I will never know. I kick things about at my feet, old lamps eaten away by rust, brittle leaves that perhaps remember a trace of green. Seven anchors, all rusty.
"You've been travelling…a long time," the words come in a soft whispered breath.
"Yeah…" She's been watching me. She touches her gown and casts her eyes down. "It's been so long, I'm not sure I know when it began. I was a child once; I remember this ship and this ocean, I remember passing strange lands." Her eyes then take on a dreaminess. "And...I remember meeting someone in one of these lands. Someone distant. Like a dream. I remember losing my dearest treasure, gaining something in exchange—"
Her next word is cut by a scream as the ship flings us hard against the wall, sending everything crashing against us. Shards and shrapnel. We lie sprawled on the ceiling. An anchor crashes beside us. Something tears a gash in my arm, and I clench my teeth. She is already weeping beside me.
"I—I'm sorry this had to happen. Not while you were here. Not now—"
"It's okay," I whisper quickly back, trying to smile.
A crash of metal on glass, glass on metal, flings us apart.
I hear her screams again, somewhere far beyond myself. In the flashes of fire, I watch as the lantern is shattered against the wall and the wick throbs desperately. The blades ricochet against the wall an inch from my face.
"Marin!" I roar through this ocean of shadows, as if she were a thousand miles away. Is she still here? Will I ever see her again? I search everywhere for handhold. I cannot feel my own heart. "Marin, Marin! Where are you?"
"Cielo!" she cries back, so softly I don't know if it's real.
No east, no west. Where is the sun? Where does it go?
The sway of the vessel throws me in among the stones and knives, like rocks hidden in bays that pierce the hulls of the entering ships. I think there are cuts through my fingers, and my veins are screaming in all the colours of fire. I crawl and grovel. The depths blind me, and I thirst for water without salt.
Among the shards, my torn fingers find a thin wooden shaft. Though I don't know what it is, I know holding onto it will save my life.
The world sways, axis unhinged, but I hold on—I know I must, even after we die and the ship, the sea, become our tomb.
Electric bolts of pain shoot up my limbs. She's stopped sobbing; is she dead? Goddess, she isn't dead, please.
Grip tightening on the wood, I stumble to my feet. The floor tips and my stomach heaves the way it always does, then my head is flung against a wall and sparks explode in my eyes.
She's as broken as I, slumped against the chamber wall, lips bleeding all the things she never said but longed so fiercely to. The light is changing. I understand now: we're at the horizon; we are falling off its edge.
I fall to my knees upon a rusting anchor, feeling it creak beneath my bones, and I reach to clean the streak of blood away, to sweep the hair from her face; her eyes haven't lost the shade and swirl of the sea. It roars. She roars with it, everywhere around me, fighting to get closer. I think I know now; I think I love her.
"Are you...okay?" she asks, and I know I don't know I am, but I nod anyway.
"I wish I had seen more of the ship," I answer. "Do you think we'll survive? Do you think you could show me all the other rooms?"
I know from the silence that neither of us knows the answer. Blinking to clear the dust from my eyes, I glance downwards and raise between us the thing that saved my life.
In the beating lamplight, I make out four perfect paper blades, and a balsam pin.
Everything is glass and liquid around me, as its shape connects with that of a memory somewhere deep in my mind. Somewhere beneath those days and rays on dry gold wheat-fields and turning waterwheels, those lustrous lands that brought forgetfulness, that troubled to scour the memory away.
I have...met the sea before.
"This is—my pinwheel?" The tempest is still growling outside. "Is this mine?"
But here everything is still, hauntingly still. Except for the flame fighting to live.
She tilts forward, eyes wide. "I think I remember…"
She reaches out to hold the little pinwheel. But slowly her fingers loosen their grip; they slip down to encircle mine. The blades twirl lazily, like one of the windmills on the coast.
Still we sit, the floor rocking beneath us like a cradle. All the world seems to lie in the touch of her hands, the only warmth I can feel any longer.
"Remember…?"
"Remember!"
A girl, pressing a glass seashell into my palm, taking the pinwheel from mine—sweeping the golden curtains aside and gazing with a sigh at the river beneath my window.
A girl making a trade and knowing that she will never undo it. Something by which we'll remember each other by.
A girl with eyes like the sea.
She glances up at me in question, and I smile without having to try.
"I've met you before," I say it at last, sure now, drawing towards her like a cold man to a fire. She's still holding the pinwheel. Holding me. "I met you once, long ago. Remember that day? You visited me once! It doesn't feel like it happened at all, like in a dream! You gave me a glass shell, and told me not to forget. Remember?"
Memory kindled by the words, her eyes brighten suddenly. "Yes—yes, I do," she answers earnest and soft, suddenly clasping my hands. "I remember! That was the place where we once met. The horizon at the other end of the world. And you gave me the pinwheel…I've almost forgotten!" She pauses, and the light is golden in her eyes. "We promised that we'd travel together, and go where the sun goes. That's why it kept returning, Cielo! That's why the river called me, even though you lived so far away. You're my destination!" She grins, a sail unfurling to catch the wind.
"Destination? Then your journey's over."
"And I suppose I must start a new one now," she answers with a small laugh. "Perhaps the same one. Perhaps I've started a thousand journeys before, all so I could meet you!" Her voice softens a bit. "Perhaps I'll forget once you've gone."
She leans forward, and then she's on her knees, so near I can feel her breathing. "Like the sea?" I murmur, following her lead—because here and now without a speck of coast in sight, we're closer to the horizon we ever could be. Nowhere near, but close enough. "The sea, with all its whims and hues, that changes as it pleases…I forget it every time."
She brushes hair from my forehead and laughs again. "But I can't forget the sky," she answers, dreamily. "Always close. Always a thousand miles away."
I'm deaf to the screams of the storm outside; I'm blind in the glow of the dying lamp, and somehow I am speechless even though I have a million things to say. Just as the engine is her heart, this place—the lost room—the Horizon—is her hope, the same hope that has led her on all these journeys so far.
Turning, I kiss her. Her grip tightens around my wrists as our lips meet—and she returns it as if she has been waiting for it for several centuries. Breathlessly I slip away, and she sobs again, tears streaming down her cheeks in rivers of shadow. But before I can hold her and comfort her, she kisses me once more.
The wick tells the last of its scented tale, and dies. The ocean harmonises to the melody of the rain above, our soundtrack as the ship loses itself in the blue of the horizon where the sky meets the sea.
I awaken the next few mornings to nondescript greyness and wind on the deck. The rain and wind have ceased, leaving a thick fog. Our sandalwood checkerboard-table was blown overboard.
The ship rocks on the grey-blue waters. We pray that as long as we don't wind up in the doldrums, the invisible streams of the sea will take us somewhere.
Or everywhere. Or maybe nowhere at all.
Three weeks. We have been surviving by rain and prayers alone. She keeps me alive with her stories, and I keep her awake with my laughter.
In the wee hours of the twenty-third day, I dream of a distant voice calling me to the deck. But as I drag my eyes open, I only realise that the voice in the mist is hers,laughing merrily. And so I do as told, following her out of the antechamber and into the open air.
The border between the sea and the sky is slowly reappearing, and upon it, something small is nestled: a pinprick of golden light, a firefly asleep on the horizon.
Now I am in the engine room, flicking every last switch in the room and cranking the levers. She reads the dials swiftly, turning wheels and adjusting knobs everywhere.
And all at once, the ocean is churning against our bow, and the sky is breezing past like silver banners. The ship cuts the night, a blade of song. The light swells as we approach, dividing into two, ten, an entire congregation.
And just like that, the horizon ceases to exist, for the world is round and the cities repeat, and sky and sea meet over and over, wherever we go.
W: Wherever
The ship bobs gently in the water by the jetty, jutting near the foggy estuary where I began. As I emerge from the old antechamber, she calls me up to the deck. "Cielo…you can go home now," she says.
Racing to her, I begin to shed tears. "But why?"
Beyond the deck, I see the spires and blocks of the harbour, all silent and swaying. Something in those shadows is calling, calling me back, a thousand miles away.
"Birds aren't meant to be trapped in cages." She smiles. A tear streams from the corner of her eye, saltwater. "You are theirs—your home's, your world's. And I have nothing here for you."
"But you don't need to have anything, Marin!"
Shaking her head slowly, she unrolls the tapestry for me. There's something new at the end of the sand-crusted weaving: a formless tangle of seaweed. "Nothing's made sense since the day we lost the compass," she explains, laughing. "There's so much more waiting for you at home. So much that I could never dream of having. Let it be and go, Cielo." Her laughter fades into a mere grin. "I'll remember you—and please remember me too."
I try to smile back.
The world is mist all around me, as I linger on the gangplank between heaven and earth. The ship floats on the crystal estuary; her horn call is gentler now. In these seconds, I find myself turning to take a last glimpse at her.
"Where will you go after this, Marin?"
"I don't know. Westward, maybe. I want to see where the sun goes every night."
But without the compass do you know where "west" is, Marin?
I reach out, and my fingers close around hers. "Will I see you again?" I whisper.
"You won't. Or you will, but it won't be the same and we won't be the same people." She giggles as if it were a joke no one were meant to understand but she. While I'm still trying to puzzle it out, she tiptoes to kiss me for the last time, and slips a hand into my right pocket, leaving something there. "Come on, they're waiting. And my new story is waiting too."
"I swear I won't forget you."
Nothing more is said. Down the bridge I walk, into the mists. I dream I hear a shimmering sigh behind me, and like Orpheus I turn—hoping, wishing that she's there, still waiting with a smile.
But there only remains a faint shadow of the ship and the ocean I once loved so, fading into the mist beyond. I swear I won't...
Does your story end?
As I fall through the fog between sleeping and waking, I begin to forget.
I crawl from among my crumpled silk sheets, setting my feet upon gleaming marble. I stare into the sunset, the red light painting the windows and fields a lustrous gold. The bark of a wayward dog echoes from that mill down the river; it skips across rustling currents to where I lie entangled in evening sunlight.
The air is so still and stifling here. I rise to pull the curtains apart, even though there is no wind outside.
The ornaments are still gleaming on my shelf. The shell lies asleep, glassy like the ceiling of a coral reef, the clouds that swirl beyond. I lift it in my fingers and touch it to my cheek—so cold, just like the ocean I've never seen before.
Then there is a squawk on the windowsill. A white bird with black wingtips flutters to land, dropping my gleaming golden compass onto the floor before taking off into the sun. It rolls to my feet. Bewildered I pick it up, wondering why it's tarnished, almost as if it has seen wind and brine before.
All of a sudden, I feel something moving deep within me—something like an archaic memory, of bells, and spices, and crescents of sand...
Absently I search my pockets. There, I find a playing card—the Ace with its single red heart in the centre. Flipping it over, I see a message, scrawled with a black marker:
We meet at the horizon, don't forget!
Love, Marin
I'm smiling, suddenly. Because though I don't really remember how it happened, I think I understand.
My destination, I remind myself. I'll get there someday.