Dairy of a Madman

The sea air is crisp and cool against sunbaked skin, scented with salt and rum and coconut. It pulses against his skin with each gently breaking wave, sound and feel of water and wind in perfect harmonious tandem. He feels the white grain under his feet, brittle shoreline marked with her path into the water.

He scans to the horizon and back, brilliant moonlight reflected on a hundred rolling drifts of ocean, sparkle of stars and splash of sealife. There, near the water fifty yards away � she sits, watching the curved expanse of the water at the edge of their world. The tiny night gulls and chattering sand crabs scuttle about, ignoring her in their search for the dinner the salty waves bring in, she in turn ignoring them, lost in her dreams.

Her hair whips back and forth in the breeze, a perfect storm of golden silk. The ocean water beads and rolls down her back like tears of angels on a bronze plate, her shoulders square as she pulls her knees to her chest and begins to rock slowly in the early evening tide. The breeze carries her voice, quietly singing, and he can imagine a choir of dolphins and an aquatic symphony providing the foundation for her song:

�You�re my thrill
You do something to me
You send chills right through me
When I look at you
�cause you�re my thrill

You�re my thrill
How my pulse increases
I just go to pieces
Every time I look at you
I can�t keep still�

He wants to race across the stinging sands to her, to touch her cool satin skin, to run his hands through her hair and kiss her shoulders and hold her until the moon is eaten by the sun. He is frozen, though, transfixed by her song, unwillingly to move lest the picture in front of him shatter to be carried off into the tropical night. And so he stands, body to the ocean and eyes to the night, and watches as his heart is stolen by the angel on the shoreline, stars in her voice and not a cloud in the sky.

�Oh where�s my will
Why this strange desire
Flaming higher and higher
Every time I look at you
I can�t keep still
Oh you�re my thrill�