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To Sail Beyond the Sunset

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She hears that he has left, and in her grief cries out in anger at the crowning injustice of this sorry world. The tears that streak her face once mourned a lover’s loss, and then a father’s, but now it’s anger mixed with envy that she feels, wishing the salt drops she tastes upon her cheek were blown by a sea breeze, herself aboard a ship and sailing westward.

He’s left for England – foreign shores, she thinks, and men who know him not, but nonetheless adventure, somewhere new. He sails away to sea as if it’s easy, but she knows it can’t be so, because here she is, still at home in Denmark, having never traveled more than a few leagues from Elsinore in her entire young life. The soft-falling snow outside her window makes her curse the cold and long for warmer climes, astounding vistas, vibrant colors strewn across fields of eternal summer just beyond the setting sun – they could be there and she would never know, never knowing anything beyond anything, not being conversant with the trespass of boundaries. All these years she’s stayed inside the lines and what good has come of it? Her father forces her to betray her lover, her lover forces her to lose her father, and all the time she’s just a pawn in a game that men play of boredom or spite.

They’re both gone now, lover and father – one to a land she will never see, but the other to a world she is beginning to realize she may already know too well, for what, she thinks, can be the difference between what lies after the end of a life and the substance of a life never begun?