Rhin
The light plays off the water in oranges and reds and blues. My stomach is still turning from being on this boat, but it isn't half so bad as last night. It's the worst when the sun sets. I couldn't lie still for five minutes in the belly of this hell-pot. The other men snigger at me, thinking I'm unable to handle the rocking on the water. They don't see the faces though. The faces of all the other men who have died on this godforsaken ship. I can see them, and they're coming for me.
She didn't think I could do this anyways. What did it matter to me now, knowing that she's not even around anymore to be angry with me, to blame me for the stupid mistakes I keep making. One more beer, one more high, one more shady building on the wrong side of town. What's it matter? Well, I guess as much as the fellows with the flashing lights think a cold body on cracked cement matters... They don't matter either anyways.
What was beyond those perfect eyes was beyond me. They caught me up in their unwavering gaze as easily as those words, sweet as the wind before a rainstorm, broke my heart in two. I shivered against the cold air and blinked back the tears in my eyes as he asked me if I was alright. Of course I wasn't alright. I told him I was. I told him that I would be, but I had to whisper the words because my voice was breaking. And I knew that he pitied me; I hated that he pitied me when he said I would find someone someday. When he said that, a bitter taste filled my mouth because it reminded me how much I hated the word someday. Someday was just an excuse to explain away my loneliness and make others feel better about it.
I was reminded that I was a monster in a woman's body. My love unwanted, a novelty to be gawked at and held at arms length. No one ever wanted to love me because the way I loved terrified them... and something else that they were always too afraid to speak of. There was something terrible they saw in me that, no matter how much I searched for it, I could not find - a dark beast prowling my eyes and invisible to none but me. I was forever doomed to be unwanted.
She was crazy, a mistake. She was the wind that drove the storms. Her screams were songs and her passion was like the hot blood coursing through her veins. She was the winter, violent beautiful and in the eyes of the world, she was a misspelled woman.
She looked like a pile of scraps, all bound in cord. The young child stumbles forward, dragging the bespattered and patched cloak - her only possession - behind her like a blanket.
It was hot, so hot. I felt like I was going to faint, but I had to keep going. On and on and on and there seems to be no end to the sweaty, cramped crawl space. I can hear the sounds of pounding metal getting closer.