The Sail

Nothing has less in common than all of the girls that have loved me,just like in the right frame of mind, all sunny days are the same.

The sensation of some girls is best described as a fog you have to walk out of. It’s a beguiling sort of demise. A perfumed haze, naked, and wicked, and as helpless as it is assured. Ephemeral in her wants, perpetual in her haunts.

It passes quickly, washes over you like a tidal wave, and just as violently, she retreats. Defenses are dares. Try to retreat and still you remain a sojourner, breathless like the night, words take form on her lips like clouds blocking out the midday sun, your world becomes as barren as the moon. And always that fog, she hems you in until even her weaknesses she can turn against you. The lighthouse in the storm becomes just another snare, and the wind and the water and the waves join in chorus against you. Her smile is the shore they long to break you upon.

It takes years, if you are so bold as to throw yourself to the tempest that is the sea, her tears at once drown you, and just as quickly they sting, injurious barbs of a sea scorned. And in the midst of the greatest waves a sudden calm, until you find yourself back where you began, marooned by her love, or shipwrecked as before.

As a stronger man you may have done everything you could to keep your eye on the horizon, the sun at your back, and your fretful thoughts far from mind—in this way the heart was most open to all the good things the world may show you. But such things are not always in love's best interest, at least not that first sort of love which draws tears, and harsh words, and the will to do the sort of things you recall to mind and wish you could recant some years from now.

No, real love leaves you dizzy, and spiteful, and euphoric, and desperate, and adrift in a fog. The best of them come out of it quickly, and wiser, and dream of the ocean only from the safe harbor of the shore. Some never return from that maiden voyage, none the wiser for the difference of course, lucky and damned alike somewhere in the briny deep that is the blissful sleep of submission.

And the rest are wanderers, I count myself accordingly with this lot. Praying most often for the very storm that mad Russian's Sail so ardently longed for. Knowing full well that nothing is so exhilarating as that first love, that first wave, that ruinous feeling that is conquest, that is spying the great depths of an ocean which is bound and determined to envelop you, and it will, until the only question which remains is; how many more times?