The rain continues to fall as I gaze across the great ocean. Onward it sprawls, limitless in direction and savagery. The sky is black with the impartial darkness of an everlasting twilight and yet there are no stars to be seen. No stars or light. No light. The waves eternally roll and break into soft, milky foam; their continuity serves as the calming mask worn by a theatrical villain to deceive the unwary, and I have beheld it night after night, day after day. The dichotomy between day and night is increasingly blurred in a compounding way, and I find myself in this moment of chaotic and yet unchanging perplexity for some forty days without change.
The breeze around me is sharp and stale. So stale! The very air I breathe tastes old and lifeless, almost metallic and bitter. I spit it and I sputter it away and yet I taste it all the same.
I glance down at my tired, gray hands and relive the purpose of my deeds: I received so little from so few and have taken so much from so many and I have only to look so far as within myself to find the cause of my present. Everything I have done I have judged and believed to be right, and the lives I have taken were not taken without calculated purpose. It was deserved, deserved and warranted! Of this, I am certain. Certain!
I sigh as I have sighed many times before. I feel no regret and no joy. I feel calm. Calm, only calm.
And yet…yet I must still hope. Hope! I implore! I must hope that my actions will yet be fruitful. I must hope that the poison can be cured. I must hope that there can be a second chance and life shall bloom where it had long since rotted away into vice and ignorance and cruelty. I must hope that my hope is not the hope of a fool, for I take myself to be no fool. No fool! No fool.
My eyes drift slowly across the water-drawn horizon. I inhale. I inhale deeply and taste a sweet coolness I have not tasted in ages. Intoxicating is this sweetness, this taste. What coolness! This taste!
Yes… Yes! I feel this hope and I believe. I believe I have not hoped in folly. I believe that the winds of change can still blow and not just blow but blow for the better! Not for me but for the better of all, it can blow. I feel it. I feel it blowing inside me like the swell of a great gale building into burst! Let it burst! Burst!
I feel the faint light in my heart that has wilted so dim rekindle itself and within the perseverance of embers it silently and steadily glows and begins to burn anew. It grows! The warmth fills my body and I feel the air around me stir. It stirs and begins to whip into a panicked frenzy. What warmth! What frenzy, it stirs!
I can feel light, and I can see it! My eyes open wide and I behold it. My body fills with the great white light and every piece of darkness in me is pierced and stricken. It is stricken and destroyed. Destroyed! Broken!
Yes! Yes! It is high time! It is high time for an end and for a beginning, an omega and an alpha! It is time!
There will be life. Life! Not just inside me but here. Here! Where there once was it shall again be! Life!
And as I cry and I exclaim, I behold a dove as it flies to me straightly with all due purpose and duty.
I call to it, “My friend! My beautiful friend, fly! Fly back! Fly back to them and tell them! Carry with you peace to good Noah’s boat! They are saved! They are delivered! The ordeal shall pass! I judge it so, it will pass!”
It will pass! The storm shall now pass. Pass! It shall pass!