The waves crashed all around, chaotic and unchained. Dark, swelling high above the mast. Each rise of the black water threatening, waiting to crash down onto the deck and take the ship under. All it would take was one, just one wave, to deliver the ship and its crew of three to the depths. But each time a wave swelled, the catamaran rose to the crest, rested precariously at the very tip, then sank into the trough. Each time the same: rise, rest, fall.

The lone man on the deck stood at the wheel, even more minute and insignificant than the ship. He held the wheel tight, feeling the tension, the staining and bucking, as it tried to fight his command, tried to stay in the trough, which would lead to its own hasty destruction. This was not how it had always been, or always would be. The man knew this. There were days before and days to come when he and his beloved ship, a gift from his Father, would be one with him. There were days when it knew the sea better than he did, leading him through the waves in ways he could not learn from any man. The ship knew. It was in the calm, the union of ship and man, that he fell in love with his craft, but it was in the storm that he learned how to sail. On it went: tension, correction, clash.

He stood fast at his station, waiting for the Lighthouse to come into sight. That beacon he knew would come cutting through the night, leading him Home. On he stood, stoic, hardened, watching, waiting. Nothing came: no light in the darkness, no beacon, just the sea. Rise, rest, fall. Again and again. In the trough there was a hope that the crest would bring the Lighthouse into view. With each crest the hope was dashed, swept away with the crash of the wave. 

“Perhaps there is only the sea” he began to think, “only the sea and nothing more. I can see only the sea, the waves, the crest, the trough. My ship and I alone remain.” He knew in his heart of hearts this could not be. Did he not have a family? A son and daughter waiting for him?

“I’ve swept them away” the sea seemed to say, “like everything else I have eaten them, eroded them to nothing. How could I not? Can’t you yourself see that I do not relent? Do not end? Even the ship you stand on fights to join my depths. You can see the bones of your family down below, and the stones of your Lighthouse ground to sand. I was before the Lighthouse and I am after it. Stop the pointless fight. The Lighthouse has been devoured, or perhaps it was never there at all. I, the Sea, am all that ever was.”

The man looked ahead at the wave towering above him. The Sea was right. It must be right. He stood on the deck and saw the power before him, hundreds of feet above him, waiting for a moment to crash down on him, to bring him into the depths. Were the depths his home? Perhaps he had been born from the depths to ride on the waves, only to return with a wave. He felt the wheel tug against him, straining to stay in the trough. His hands loosened; he would fight no longer. He gazed up to the height of the wave, waiting for it to crash down on him and his crew sleeping below. But then he saw Her.

A woman stood atop the wave. A woman clothed in a flowing cloak of blue, pointing beyond the swell. She looked down at him in the trough, and without lowering her guiding finger, she reached down from the crest toward him. He felt the distance between them contract into nothing. He did not know if her arm stretched to the valley or if he rose to the crest, but he was atop the wave with her; his ship below his feet and his hands gripping the wheel. He looked to find the woman again, but she was gone. Instead, there was only a hole in the clouds below which she had stood, and a star shining against the sky. The star was not the sea. It was more than the sea. It was something greater, far above the tides, eager to crush the head of each wave. The man looked to the horizon where the woman had pointed. There stood the Lighthouse.