Lying in the tide, right where the waves turned over, and feeling a slight undertow ever so often as one wave advanced and the other receded at the same time.
The salty, foamy water turning my hair into something I didn't recognize, an orang-ing, dry, straggling mass that hung over my shoulders for three days untended.
Delightful crabs scuttling across the sand, white as bone or pearl.
I look out onto the yellow and brown vegetation beneath my window, at the castle-like buildings far away and wonder where do I lie in all of this? There was a time when I was unfettered. This was a time before I entered the working world, before I was independent. My heart was free as a bird when I was in college. I did not know what happiness I experienced in my creativity because I had never known different. In other aspects of my life I knew pain but my stories, sprung up lately from a gothic mist into an immersing Pre-Raphaelite painting, were a richness and the most beautiful thing I had ever known. That the most beautiful thing I knew to exist happened inside of me made me very happy, even though I didn't know it. Now I know the sun is setting, even though I can't see it, because the bank of brown, twisted trees and shrubs is lit gold, like a reflection from a golden chalice. Slowly, slowly it will fade until everything is a homogenous, uncertain gray. This is the nightma...