Well, it's been a while since I last posted here. I miss Kovey and all the stories Ducky and Blizz and me and everyone else wove each other into. Ah well. Sigh. I'd like feedback.

The autumn of my nineteenth year, I visited a tiny, little-noticed, island several miles off the coast of Maine, trying to flee the twisted reach of fervent sorrow. My aunt had owned a decrepit mansion there, and I knew the heavy, ornate key was duct-taped to the rusty bottom of the metal bathouse. I hoped to find peace there, for often peace had come to me dripping down the windowpanes with the cool morning dew. Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
It was a lovely, gloomy island by nature, unmarred by teenage rabble or tiresome tourists. Lofty hardwood lined the sandy shore, scraggly bushes blocking all but a narrow, barely discernable footpath that ran from my worn doorstep to the brusque, often angry, ocean's. I had traveled that close lane many times since my innocent childhood.
Slow rain began to drip from the dark heavens, which were filled with dingy, frantic clouds. The sea was passionate under the cryptic sky, whose patterns shifted each moment, not even now following the wind's violent course. My despair attended me as I followed the edge of the water into the small, isolated village. The temperature was as cold as my spirits while I shivered as frigid atmosphere penetrated the crocheted holes of my acrylic sweater.
I was somehow magnetized to the direction of the ocean. I found myself wandering down the only avenue, cold and alone, guided by naught but the slip of a silver half-moon. The luminous orb hung low, insistent upon ensuring my undeserved safety until it would drop below the water, relegated to inferior by the dull sunshine. A stack of dense, blue-grey clouds drifted before the moon, covering its illumination almost entirely. It became impenetrably dark, but my mind told me that it was very early morning. I felt deeply into my back pocket, searching for the stub of wax I had placed there that morning, for darkness was more frightful than I had anticipated. Finally I discovered my slender white candle, whose wick I swiftly lit. It brought the darkness closer, and made it seem deaf and all enveloping. I shielded the light with my trembling, cupped hand, afraid the strong gusts would extinguish the feeble flame.
I walked along the edge of the active water, its tide fluctuating with each of my slow, thoughtful steps. I stopped to lean against the rough trunk of a tree, and a leaf fell, swaying onto the back of my neck from the loft of its tangled, knotted branches. I reached back for it, but its desiccated shape crumbled between my colour-drained fingers, leaving nothing but the intact stem and veins. I slipped my left hand inside my clothing, over my heart, to warm it, but it seemed only to become instantly colder.
In another time, I would have been inclined to cast away all inhibitions and to dance freely beneath the battling, grey night sky, with one hand waving free above my upturned face. But now I walked alone, down the foggy ruins of remembrance, between the frightened, haunted trees, leaving footprints in the untouched sand. I walked veiled by the grey mist of emptiness, weary of all that could have been.
I gazed emptily into the ocean and hugged myself, in my own lamentation for the loss I could never call back. At some point, I collected myself and began to walk again, this time more quickly, fleeing thoughts I could not escape. I entered the town and beheld it, moving only my eyes, but not my shuddering body. So many actions I had performed on this graveled street, so many things had happened to me. I fathomed little had changed. The ancient, empty street was always too dead for dreaming.
There were just five houses on the short strip of road, if it could truly be called that, for most natives ran golf-carts between town and their houses, which wasn't far anyway. To the left of me stood the library which was set into a knoll and shrouded by thick nightly mist, which had descended on the entire village, leaving everything invisible. A few other shops and a post office were lost somewhere in the darkness. Private houses were scattered in the desolate swamp and lonely forest. This place would always seem to be my home…and to home I will always return.
I rushed through, still hunched over my candle, averting my eyes from the familiar atmosphere and locations that revived memouries long passed on. I smothered a rasping cough and the urge to enter each of the buildings as I passed them, knowing that I would be smothered by comforting welcomes from the souls within.
Reaching the other side of the village, I found myself once again stopping by the untamed ocean, its brutality transmuting my violent despair into a quiet calm. I looked out into the ocean's crests, and, despairing once again with a gasp of clear cold, I saw the flailing arms and head, elevated just above the surface of the sea before dipping under. Someone was out there, splashing and struggling among the breakers as they rolled over his head. I stepped outward from the sand into the brutal waters, in quest of a miracle. I took in the power of the moon and ripped my sweater over my head, drawing myself into the freezing liquid of silver reflection. Perceiving the cropped head submerge, I plunged into the enchantingly cold ocean. Exploring death with my shoulders, I hung with my head down in the cold: wide-eyed, contained among the treading yellow seaweed. What light existed was drawn from my eyes. My fingertips turned to stone from clutching at immovable blackness. I leapt up exploding for breath, gasping, and returned again to my pursuit.
I tasted the saltwater with every sense. My eyes stung, irritated by its unbeneficent affects. My throat was desiccated as the acridity escaped down my nose into my lungs. My lips expelled its malignant taste. It seemed to pass between my ears as I swam. It seemed so cold that it burned everything: my limbs, my face, and certainly my heart.
Finally I felt the flesh of another between my groping fingers. A child was drowning between my helpless hands. I held between my arms a child of the water.
At some point, I had dropped my candle, for there was no light in this abstruse, unpenetrable darkness, except the minute flame that burned against the sand, struggling to keep hold of the wick that leaned against the damp ground. When I pulled myself dripping out of the freezing water, I saw the candle dim out. It diminished, getting more gloomy and yellowey-grey by the very second. By the time I reached it, a few steps off, there was no reason to pick it up for it had abated to naught but a twisted piece of wax, lightless.
Up the lightly beaten path I carried him, past my door and the bat-house, past the unlit town and its inhabitants. Where my strength came from, I cannot guess, but finally, traversing through the shadowy marsh, I reached the unlit home of Dr. Cedevor.
Scaling the porch steps, I banged on the door with my tight fist until a light appeared in the upstairs window. I did not realize that I was still pounding the windowpane in the door when Mrs. Cedevor, in a plaid terry cloth bath robe with long flannel night gown hanging below it, opened it and peered at me disconcertedly, apparently not recognizing my barely-matured face in the odd glow of the moon. Dr. Cedevor appeared, looking over his wife's shoulder to see who would need his assistance at this ungodly hour, squinty-eyed, unbespectacled and in printed boxers. He started at the sight of the blue-faced, limp child slipping out of my weary arms. He had difficulty prising the child from my, although weary, possessive arms, but I finally let go with a tired whimper as the young boy was quickly placed on the floor to be revived.
Mrs. Cedevor deposited me on the sofa in the next room and rushed to assist her husband, who knelt over victim that I had brought to him. I do not know how long I sat in their den, after I pulled a blanket around me, looking directly before me and pondering over the defining events of my life. I stared dispassionately ahead while on the other side of the wall at my back, water was drawn out of the child's lungs, and life forced into them. It seemed to me as just a moment but I suspect they laboured over him for an hour or more. When I finally woke from my reverie, the physician was squatted before me, scrutinizing my tangled face.