A Story A Day. Story 281 of 365: Ocean.

Dylan looked at the ocean while rowing on his boat. It reminded him of Eileen. It could be both tame and wild, ever changing, inscrutable, willful, always full of secrets buried so deep no one could ever reach them. Volatile Eileen had the eyes of the color of the ocean on a stormy day. Nor blue, nor green, nor grey, but all of them together. He missed Eileen, he had missed her since she had left him alone with the ocean. Dylan never told her, but for him, her and the ocean were only one. However, as he had learned to navigate the treacherous waters, he had never learnt to steer at her moods. Eileen was explosive, but also sweet, and she knew what she wanted. It was her who had gone to Dylan on the first place, forcing him to take her to Mermaid island. What had she wanted to do there was a mystery to Dylan, yet he obliged. She made him take her a dozen times before she found her way into his bedroom. Back in hindsight, Dylan had been a paper boat at the mercy of the currents. And, just as she had arrived, she flew. One night, she slipped back into her clothes and jumped out of the window without a word. The following day was a windy one, the ocean crashed violently against the cliffs, and Eileen was nowhere to be seen. More than twenty years had passed and yet Dylan still remembered her. He saw her in his beloved ocean, in the storms, everywhere, wondering that, maybe, the following wind change would take her back.