Again, dawn arrives to splash colour on today’s blank canvas. Yet, this fresh sun reveals the same story: a schooner perches atop a slick, still ocean. There is not a ripple in the water, nor the sails, and the rudder cuts no current.
She’s a streamlined vessel, crafted to carry many goods and services to faraway places. Yet, on this day, she inherits no prevailing wind to tense the full breadth of her canvas.
Day. Night. Day. Still.
Her form looks gaudy in this soft light. Her decadence betrays a fall: a ship that once drew the eyes of onlookers at the grace of her motion now aimlessly adrift. In storms of old, she played in the tumult. Her ornate beauty was mischievous—how it counterposed the rough and wild. Now, bobbing in place with no mission in sight, the multifaceted becomes the superfluous, the inconvenient.
Carvings collect dust. Latches fur with flecks of rust. Boards warp and bend from a stagnant load. Even the ghosts of her memories wither from boredom and flee from this outpost. Still, she remains—haunted by inertia.
Sails, I cannot breathe a tensile breeze. Stern, I cannot churn the ocean’s rough caress.
Day. Night. Day. Still.
Her crew lies dormant; what can they do but wait? But sleep and wake again?
They remember the burnout days, when they ached for the steady beauty of the calm. Now swaddled in almost vindictive abundance, they grow restless in its monotonous ease. Stillness. They were amazed by it once; then terrified of its persistence; then oppressed by its strength.
When the world won’t give them any wrongs to right, they expend their agitation on each other. Idle hands, after all. One claims she has the solution to get them moving again. Another barks that they know the way. Still another lies paralysed, terrified she’s forgotten her training. She begs the agitators, Can’t we wait it out? They disturb the quiet air, but the slick, still ocean responds with no echo. On they bicker—no hope of enjoying it now.
Each one fights to summit the same grand peak of ‘right methodology’ only to realise dominance is a lonely road. Eventually, they see the comedy in their circumnavigation—a dog and its tail. There’s nothing to do but wait.
Day. Night. Day. Still.
With peace comes cursed silence.
Nothingness expands its territory, so the ‘less’ becomes ‘more’. Voice-less. Motion-less. Hope-less. A chainmail that descends on their bodies. Momentarily, they may lift it with the whole strength one can muster. But there is no escape—they are under it, constrained by it, opposed to it. When muscles tire and activity ceases, the links are pleased to compress them.
The conclusion that always was.