Vast silent sands reach interminably back to the ocean that deposited them, to which he also tilts his silhouette form. Striding purposefully toward the abyss, his figure glides between the pinpricks of starlight above and their reflected forms beneath his feet. The diorama mocks his insignificance.
He stops. Searching the horizon, his gaze settles as a point of light more vital than the rest resolves itself into the mooring beacons of a container ship. His gut stretches out across the water, a vertiginous yearning that pulls him insistently to adventure, the imagined kaleidoscope of other places. Any other places. He stands, transfixed with longing.
*
Climbing empty-handed from the smoky mess-room poker game on rusted steps, his footsteps lost in the immensity of the void, another stops to draw breath beneath the bridge, is assailed by tang of salty diesel oil from tired engines.
He stumbles from cheap vodka, universal currency of the sea that forges fickle manacles of comradeship between shifting tides of itinerant sailors; instinctively, he clings to the deck rail.
Beyond the vastness of this silent nothingness, warm, orange lights, intimate and inward looking, glimmer on the shore. Sickening of rootless peregrinations in a brutal existence which promised adventure, but now derides his need for purpose, he fixes his eyes on the glittering mirage of community, familiarity. It hovers, eternally out of reach.
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