A man and a woman sit upon the shore. They love one another so deeply, and finding no such love anywhere else, they decide, in that place, to stay together, with grains of sand washing away beneath them. The stars twinkle overhead, appearing and disappearing, yet the ocean before them beckons, steadfast and eternal. Already having forgone terrestrial life, they determine to descend into the Ocean, rather than endure pain in the winds of Chaos, or loss within the frigid isolation of Space.
In their minds, they hold the image of what they must become to fulfill their dreams of life together. They eat only what food passes before them, else they leave one another’s presence. They stare into one another’s eyes unblinkingly, else they lose sight of everything they love. Their breath moves in time with the waves of the ocean, and their bodies sway with it’s rhythmic motion. Knowing one another’s voices so well, they are able to speak without so much as opening their mouths, and heavy, contented sighs fill their lungs and curl the corners of their lips, higher, and further back.
There, they find themselves, swimming in the shallows, singing to one another, drinking happily and eating to fulfillment, swimming deeper and longer with every breath.
On one such trip, they are separated. The man is surrounded by inky blackness. The woman, and all else, imperceptibly dark. With a sudden snap, the man feels a mass of writhing cords wrap around him and begin undulating within his waist. No matter how he struggles, he finds himself unable to escape the sucking, throbbing agony circling his gut. Twisting and thrashing wildly to free himself from the unseen pain, the likes of which he has never known, he loses his bearings as he is overcome by the sickly hope of finding his beloved. The extent of his isolation soon becomes clear. Without her presence, her voice, her thoughts, her smile, he is lost in the depths of soothing black nothingness with a terrifying pain clinging to his waist as his only companion. The blackness neither fades, nor falters, and he finds himself blind to everything but the agony joined to him. In time, in the depths of blackness, he grows to believe that perhaps nothing remains save the blackdrop, himself, and the suffering. Having already lost so much, and with so little left, he determines to carry it with him, else he be left only with blackness.
The man spends so much time alone with the agony that it becomes part of him, and his knowing of it grows not unlike his knowing of himself. No longer scared by it, the man finds that he is able to love himself and the suffering that is carried alongside him. In time, the suffering lessens. In time, his love for it grows, until the suffering fades and the agony is no more, leaving him with love and the knowledge of its presence, but not the ignorance of its nature.
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