Sailing

Prompt: Every day the sun comes up and every night it goes down again.

Source: writingforward.com

Response: Sailing

We have been on this boat for so long that it has become a part of us - the creaking wood has become nothing more than a shaky extension of our shaking fingertips. I am past feeling sick - perhaps past feeling anything other than the wet and the cold.

The wind is vicious - biting our salt-blistered skin with icy fangs and screaming in our ears. The sea has turned to acid around us - burning deep into the wounds that the chaffing wind leaves. The sky is all too often dark and hanging like boughs laden with snow.

Every day the sun comes up and every night it goes down again, leaving us in absolute darkness, huddled together while the wind bites. My salt-stung eyes begin to imagine the sun's rays on the horizon long before sunrise, making a glimmer of the distant stars into a yellow gleam, and I begin to rejoice that it is morning and no longer night. Sometimes my eyes also imagine that, in the halo of the sun's glow, that there is land - all green and tropic. But there is no land.

We have not seen land for so long.

But when the sun does come up, it is never in the direction I was looking. I always imagine it coming up like a conquering hero and bathing the world in warmth, but its rays are never as warm as I had pictured.

Our timbers - the boat and ours - tremble under the sun's fingers' much needed touch. It dries out a little of the cold and chases away a little of the wet.