The wind whipped right through me as I stood on the quay side squinting out to sea, searching for a figure of a boat that wasn't there. I was routed to the stone beneath my feet because if I were to look away for just one moment, I might miss it as it moved silently through the fog and although the storm stung my eyes I kept them fixed on the ever blurring line of the horizon. I was longing to see the ship not because of the ship its self but because of what it held. It's the same with so many things. I am not afraid of the dark, but what waits for me there. And the confession I'm scared to make, not because of the words that I will speak, but because they might force me to let go of a fantasy. And I am afraid that there is nothing in the mist because that means that the man who I love is lost at sea and accepting that would be too painful to bear.
From children, when I was minding the bakery he would come in, once a week, every Sunday to spend half of his earnings on a rich steak pie which he would walk to the harbor walls and eat while staring out to sea wishing he was exploring them. He was never just a customer though and ever since we were twelve years old, we were best friends. He used to come and visit me in the bakery and I him in the docks. We earned peanuts but those were some of the freest days of my life. Then came the time when he was old enough to work on the trading boats between here and Spain and he would be gone for months at a time, but he always came back with exotic fruits and foreign fabrics which he had bought while he was there. The trade routes kept expanding until he was sent on a voyage to China which at the time I was seventeen and he, a year older. It was the longest that he had ever been away and it was strange for me in his absence, baking bread and other food for my mothers shop every day so that I could make a better life for myself. I carried on with my life only being able to dream of what he would be doing. He returned a year later and there was something different about the way he walked, and his face looked older. That was when my whole life changed. In the year apart, we had both grown up.
I am twenty one now and the trade routes are ever expanding but with an ever keen eye on visiting new places, he set out for our colony in Botany Bay to see if the stories were true of the land beyond the seas. The voyage was scheduled to take 20 months and it was now the 24th. I do not want to loose hope that he could be out there, alive but so many things could have happened. Scurvy was common at sea and the illnesses of a foreign land could have taken him as well as a storm leaving them stranded, but a part of me still believes that he was delayed or stopped off in Cape Cod as is common, but it wouldn't take this long. I cannot move on with my life while there is still that possibility that he could come back to me.
It had gotten too dark for me to see two feet in front of me so I retreated back to my cottage only to find a letter pushed under my front door. It was in that moment that I realized. He wasn't coming back.
"The scaryest thing about distance is that you don't know if they'll miss you or forget you"
