Abyss
She's drowning in it.
Waving sea of wheat, all golden rich, food for the hungry. The fields are her life. Dawn to dusk, every dewdrop-stained morning, every twilight evening, she spends in the fields. What need has she for anything, if she has the crops to bring in? Empty with the need to please, to satisfy a compulsory altruism. Mother keeps calling her back to the fields. The sea of golden, mocking food is her mother's favorite daughter, the lifeblood to wipe away the sorrow of her losses. Into the fields, out of the fields, she hardly remembers anyone's face. Sixty-eight seasons of farming for others and going hungry herself.
She is going under, starving for something ,anything, and nothing. She hates gold.
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She hates gold, but she becomes a bandit anyways. A sea of stars, all aglitter, cover her new days. Sleeping beneath sunlight, sprawled 'cross dusty fields, waking and fighting beneath sparkling skies. Freedom dances merrily with her when the numbers are odd and no one else will, freedom kissing her cheeks. The winds blows by, carrying leaves that shadow the stars in their movements, as they rise and fall to the waves. Starlight, starlight, each of the stars a new love as she is finally free.
She is full to the brim with freedom, surrounded by its life-giving breeze. She loves silver.
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She loves silver, and diamonds, and pretty things. Money, the silver denarius, her forbidden delight. Like a child with a new toy, she lets the bags of money spill their bowels onto the floor around her. Surrounded by a sea of hypnotic money, she can only think that she needs more. More, to keep her happy. More, because she needs the company money seems to bring- strong men smiling at her in amusement. A coin for each star, she thinks, but you can't count stars the way you count money- they're too many and they continue on while you're left behind. And she won't be left behind, so she lets the greed put its arms around her, lets it kiss her where freedom used to, lets money replace air as the prime necessity.
There is never enough, can never be too much, and she is sick to death of money but how can she stop? She needs more.
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She needs more and piracy is far more rewarding then petty raids. So to the wooden ship she takes, money buried deep beneath. To the side of a companion not so well known, who holds her hand and can name each of the stars she used to love. A man who takes her hand and carves out a path 'cross the sea and sky, where money is counted in smiles traded. The winds of freedom, they push her into his arms, where money has no meaning. The coins fall into the water, drop by drop; she sheds them like denied tears. Love, love, love, she loves him and the sea and the sky, loves each star and its reflection, loves the crest of each wave as it tries to grasp a far-off moon. Clinging to him like an anchor, she flies, into an unknown, where the golden fields of wheat are unheard of.
It's metaphorical, poetry in motion, to sail and cry, and to fall in love. She knows what she wants.
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She knows what she wants, or she wants to think she does, because he's changed. He's become the loving gentleman she never wanted, and his kindness, his protectiveness, is stifling. The air can't touch her in his arms, so she slips from his embrace into the ocean's wet one instead. The sea, the sea, the sea, it calls her every day, to swim within it, to throw stones across, it never leave it. No house out of its sight ever sees her; no day ever catches her far from it. The farms of home seem as distant as the stars, but infinitely less precious. A horizon she cannot reach, but is willing to point her spyglass at. A dance with nature that never ends; just stretches on and on as far as the eye can see.
If she were immortal, this would be the span of a thousand centuries before she could tire of it, if she ever did. But she is mortal, and that is inescapable.
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But she is mortal, and that is inescapable, and the mixed silver and black of the starry sky, silent moon, and lapping waves without a hint of gold is her funeral pyre. She is falling, deep into the abyss, where her life didn't truly begin but can properly end. It is fitting that she should sink into the water; sink down deep under just as the sun peeks out over the horizon. Encased in gold, she imagines she is sinking into the sun itself, all hot fury. Her mother is holding out her hand to her, pulling her back towards the fields. But she goes deeper, down-down-down. Into a pristine perfection, a void where he can see every grain of sand in every inch of ocean and yet be utterly blind. Her love, her most generous and her most selfish, because without greed, without freedom, without anything she can be.
The sea!
She is drowning in it.
The sea! It is only a colossus of herself.
Down into the abyss where skeletons sing, and she drowns with a smile on her face.
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