UNFINISHED Sometimes, it's mornings like this that make me remember what brought me here. Maybe it's the quiet calm of the docks, or the cool breeze that rolls in off the ocean, but for some reason I feel as if I'm the only one here, alone in my pain. This is what I came for, to get away from everything in my life, to escape the tightening noose of events threatening to stifle me. The pains, the heartache, the pressure to perform were all things that I would never want to look back on. The healing waves of the sea called me to a more simple life, one where I could forget it all. I happily abandoned all that I had, or at least all I believed I had, to live a more simple life as a fisherman in the aged harbor of this quiet fishing village. The sea is my cure, it helps absorb all my problems, and its depths so vast that in it my problems are completely swallowed.      That's what makes these mornings so hard. Days like today the sea can do nothing to help block the pain, instead every wave is another dagger to increase my suffering. Memory is such a strange thing, just when it appears to be completely erased it resurges, like the many storms that follow a calm like this. These days there is no escape from any of it. The calm, and the fear that it will be shattered by a storm, blocks all refuge. Sometimes I just pray that a storm will come, and will wash away all of these emotions, return them back into the sea. Sometimes they do. Sometimes that hope's all I have . . .      Frequently I'm jolted awake at night surrounded with memories of the life I abandoned. The pain of my failure lies in the air like a thick fog over the water, and at nights there is no escape. Five years ago as a talented but unsuccessful writer I fled the pressures of his life to live a simpler one by the sea. My life's work, the novel I had dreamed of writing for years, had come to a complete halt. I can still remember the page when I stopped, unable to write anymore. I'm often haunted by nightmares of blank pages, a novel that cries out to be finished, yet I am unable to answer.      It's strange, in my mind I can see my masterpiece clearly. Often I think of the characters, and after all the years I've come to know them as if they were close friends. I even feel guilty that I cannot bring them to life in my story, but the words, their bloodline, has run dry. Sometimes thinking of them even gives me the courage to drag my typewriter from under the bed, put a clean page in, close my eyes, and type. No matter how inspired I feel sometimes, I'm never able to write more than a paragraph or two at a time before I rip the paper from the typewriter and throw it into the trash. I guess it's a curse.      It's now the morning after one of the most intense storms I've ever been through. Thunderous cracks of lightning opened the sky, unleashing torrents of rain that pounded my roof. Wind gusts tore apart trees like shreds of paper and rattled the windows in my house. For some reason I do not know, I was compelled to venture out into the storm.      Through the rain soaked streets I made my way to the docks. The sky was alive with the constant glow of lightning followed by deafening booms of thunder. Wind blew large, stinging drops of rain into the side of my face. Leaves that gathered and clogged drains created streams in the streets. I trudged through these as I made my way to the ocean, impelled by some unseen force that I couldn't understand or distinguish. When I reached the docks I found angry waves crashing over the break walls, tossing the boats which clung to the docks for safety. As I looked out into the ocean all I could think was that I was going to die, I wouldn't see the storm out. Then, as I sat there, waves crashing onto me, I began to think about what my life was like before I moved here. I thought about the reasons I started writing my story, and how the intentions got all twisted and distorted. It was this that drove me here, and only then, in the eye of death, did I come to terms with it.      So today, throughout the town lie the ruins of last night's destruction. In the harbor floats the remains of many fishing boats ripped apart by the waves, the streets are littered with trees and shingles of roofs torn off by the wind, and in my typewriter is a clean sheet of paper.
Nate Dougherty
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