The Pearl Of Great Price
The night is warm and you sleep out on the deck of the Pearl, or don't sleep, lying still on the warm boards of your ship long after the crew have made their way to bed. The sky is large and full of stars, and you smirk at the thought that the same coin-like moon now taming the tides of the Caribbean also traces an amused path across the window of the Turner bedroom. Dear William and his Elizabeth, now no doubt safe and sleeping in each other's arms. It may well be that some part of them pities your loneliness. After all, the prizes they won from this little venture were all warm flesh and words of love, vows of honor, living treasure that - speaking - swore never to desert. And a ship cannot speak or swear. A ship cannot keep one company through the long Caribbean nights when the wind, restless and blowing from the south, whispers of Spanish rivers ripe to be sailed.
But though Will and Elizabeth have sailed, they'll never a sailor make between them, and there are things they do not understand. Such as what it is that drives a man from shore to shore, stripping away lust for men and women in the fierce bright ecstasy that is the embrace of the sea.
The sea: it rolls beneath you now. The waves whisper sleep, sleep, sleep, and the sails billow sleek with wind, and you are at home at last, on the sea. On the sea. Your ship creaking quietly beneath you as its salt-rough keel plows the Caribbean... el mar Carib, that solemn silver sea that holds its secrets fast but offers you such a taste--- enough to keep you searching, enough to keep you sailing, a seduction you plunge into willingly and with a smile on your face.
Other days, there will be cutlasses and steel. Starvation, maybe; seasons of storms, the return of the Royal Navy. You'll plunder and pillage and maneuver your motley crew all over the Spanish Main, and half the people you meet'll think you're a right maniac, and the other half will just think you mad. Mostly they'll be right. But there's a certain kind of madness that belongs to mariners. It means being swept out to sea by passion, grand passion, the kind in story books--- the sort you'd sell your soul for to lay a hand on. The pearl of great price, right, mate? To set yourself adrift on an endless sea, totally alone but for the ship beneath you and the love that seizes your heart right in your chest. There's nothing left for you then but to sail. And so you sail.
But tonight---- tonight, the night is warm, and you sleep out on the deck of the Pearl, and after ten years of loneliness you feel that finally, finally, your heart has come home.