Mist lazily opened his right eye, and then the other. His muscles were like strands of metal, and their heavy weight was bearing down on his slim skeleton. Underweight for his age, Mist tried to move around his limbs and get them back under his control, with a sudden jerk he sat himself up in his kayak. He was wearing a plain white shirt that was neatly ironed and buttoned up till his throat and a pair of khaki-colored shorts, he tried to undo the top button of his shirt, but his fingers were mimicking a mouse trying to wiggle itself out of a trap. When he could finally breathe after his war with a singular button, he filled his lungs with the cold and sharp air of the night, the moon shone in all its glory. Mist snapped to his senses and found himself to be stuck in his kayak, he couldn’t wiggle his feet out of it and there was no paddle in sight, fear swam in his veins and ran laps in his body while he sat up frozen in the kayak under the moonlight in the high seas; he was like a bacteria smear under the microscope, confined within his own sight and bound to it.
Mist was stranded in the middle of the high seas, not a single landmark or lifeform in sight, the closest heaven to him was the moon; whose rays he used as a flashlight to glance at a vast sea of nothingness. He couldn’t remember how he ended up in this situation, there was nothing in the kayak that could help jog his memory either, anytime he tried performing a sweep inside it he came up empty handed. He felt like he had drank a cocktail of surprise and dementia with a spritz of fear that had left him with an amazing hangover and aided in his inability to remember anything of significance.
‘How did I end up here??’, Mist questioned himself, but all answers lead to nowhere.
With no paddle to move him along in his kayak in sight, he started to use his hands and cupped them and began moving them in rowing motions along the cold water, he had never done this before but somehow these movements and actions came naturally to him and he began to make good progress relative to a snail.
‘Better than nothing.’ He thought.
Like a snail leaving behind a trail of mucus on the glass window, he began moving towards the direction of the moon, as that was his only anchor during these dark times. The more he tried to move through the sea, the louder the silence was. His eyes were scanning the landscape as he tried to find any landmark of meaning that would help him understand better how he could move out of this puddle of despair.
After about an hour of manual rowing, his arms grew tired and his fingers shriveled up to look like they were raisins, his fingertips were on the verge of falling off with frostbite as the cold water wasn’t forgiving to those who dared to take a dip and indulge themselves in it. He held his hands close to his chest and cupping them around his mouth whilst blowing warm air onto them in an effort to defrost his fingers like thawing sausages. He knew that his efforts were in vain as his landscape remained unchanged and he ended up exhausting himself. He had an exceedingly small vial of hope within, that soon found itself punctured and leaking, leaving a trail in his ship’s wake. His cold skeleton wanted to reunite with the soft mud of the earth and warm itself with the remnants of his ancestors.
Ripples of water brushed against his kayak as he felt himself shift in the water and drift a little. Through an unknown fog, he saw a woman in a similar kayak floating towards him, she wasn’t using a paddle but seemed to inch closer in his direction through the sheer randomness of chance. She was inching closer towards him, like two magnets drawn closer and closer to each other by unseen forces. She had a frail and slim figure, long red hair, her head hung low and you couldn’t see her face through her hair that had veiled her facial features to any onlooker. She wore a white dress with blue clouds stitched across it. As her kayak kept drawing closer & closer to Mist, he got wary of the unknown and started to shift in his seat, unsettled like a soda can ready to burst open.
Her kayak halted inches from his. Mist looked at her to find that sense of familiarity that he was unable to fetch from his surroundings. Her face began to reveal itself, Mist allowed himself to be further struck by the lightning of confusion as his mind went as blank as his landscape. Two strangers who caught each other while they were adrift in nothingness, a situation that had no correct answers and no correct conclusions.
They stared at each other, assessing each and every strand of hair on their scalp, counting the wrinkles on each other and placing infinite bets on the origins of either. The woman had mascara running down her cheeks and her eyes had gotten puffy from all the crying she must have suffered through before finding Mist. Upon a closer look he saw, she was holding two wooden sticks. They had an intricate design and seemed to be hand crafted, they were broken at each end like they had been ripped apart from the cradle they were holding. She had bloodied them from gripping them so tight that her fingernails dug into her palms that soaked the wood and her dress with blood. Tears rolled from her eyes, but she no longer sobbed.
The blank space between them amplified into an endless void. Neither of them could face each other with their truest self, that farce was hidden beneath the tarp of self-preservation. The wooden sticks lay bloodied in her hands, wanting to hold up the safe space they were meant to cultivate, raise life and confine misery outside them. The woman drew a parallel to a deer in headlights, she wasn’t confident enough to get to know this unknown, just bearing the pain and carrying on the safe haven, not knowing who would reside in it, whether that haven would ever give her shelter. Mist was the light she thought she saw, but soon she realized the moon was pathing her to move forward and through him, that this wasn’t who the cradle was meant for. Mist found himself in further misery as he couldn’t understand what he was supposed to do anymore. He sat in his kayak shifting nervously, he wanted her to belong here, so he wouldn’t be left alone in his hellscape.
He tried to shift towards her kayak but the more he tried the stronger the seatbelts of his failures held him back. The joy had worn off, now they had become strangers in their own boat, trying to move forward and onto further endings. The thought of loneliness swept them both away like a tsunami, washing away the fires of civilization in oneself. The landscape was vast and unending, but this didn’t seem like the funeral of their journey. Shadows of everything and nothing started dancing around as they looked down at what they held, Mist had his consciousness to provide and the women her sticks. Neither held the benefits of their existence on their fingertips, only fences that would further draw distinction.
The lady reached out and held the sticks in Mist’s face, offering them up, knowing they didn’t belong here. He closed his eyes, his hands gripped the sticks, he held onto them for hope, to fix the vial that was bleeding dry. He opened his eyes and discovered that the lady had disappeared, he looked around to find where she could have been, he saw that she had moved past him, her body was no longer shaking, he knew she wasn’t crying anymore. The next second he saw her hands move outside the kayak and drop something in the water, he couldn’t see clearly at the distance that she was, but he saw that she no longer crouched in grass hiding from fear. He turned around and saw two oars in his kayak. ‘Life’, he thought.
He picked them up with his freezing fingers and started rowing in the opposite direction of the lady. The water around him told him stories of his loneliness, reciting them like those from a legend. He saw a horizon in his mind that no landscape could ever create. The sun began to rise, a new dawn had set out for the lady as she kept floating through her sea of tears, Mist ruled his kayak and kept pushing further into the abyss that began to show its endless self.
Breathing a deep breath, he said, “Goodnight, Solace.”