Unreason

We were bored. It wasn't just the boredom of a lost afternoon it was the boredom of an interstellar traveller with only the stars for company and infinity as a reminder.

We needed something new, but we discovered that everything had been done. The world had been mapped, every depth plumbed, all the choices had been made, we had reached the end of the book and every page thereafter was blank - no adverts, no promise of things as yet unsaid. Time as it was, after a turbulent youth in the mountains, had hit the flood plain of its senescence. It lay ahead in uncertain coils. But looking back towards the sun, the river burned.

We lived then in a house by the sea set atop dark granite cliffs. Across two thousand miles of empty ocean great waves rode towards us on the wind. When they reached the land they spent their energy in frustration and pulled boulders big as houses through the sucking darkness beneath the cliffs.

When the tide went out and the ocean, restless, slept we would walk amongst the boulders in silence. Sometimes the wind and waves would leave these boulders in uneasy equilibrium, balanced so that you could move them with your hand.