The Abandoned Window     The Old Man looked from his chair beside the window where he spent his waking hours sitting looking out to the sea as it joyfully tossed about.     He had fished all his life, carried his aches and pains, proudly found food and friendship from the sea, until the accident, the fall that broke him, left him crippled, confined to the wheelchair in which he sits and looks and longs.     “When will my ship come home?” he asked the sea he loved, tried still to love, could love before, but not now.     "Take me away from here,” he cried out to sea. “Take me away from this pitiful life I live as a cripple. Take me back to sea where I knew you for all my life.”     But his ship did not come to take him from his suffering and he grew in hatred, first of his Creator; and all else followed: sea, land, woods, sky, family, friend, and most of all, himself and who he was and what he had done before and had left undone.     He stopped waiting at the window for his ship to come, would no longer even get out of bed to make the long crippled walk to his chair by the window. He just laid there in bed, a living dead, waiting for the body to die with his already numb nearly dead soul, his dream of returning home fading, faded, more now just a symbol that had lost its meaning.     And his ship came from the West and as the sun set upon the sea, his ship met the sun at the horizon’s beginning. She set a course to her destination, blindly safely sailing through darkness into the rocky harbour to the wharf where sea and land met.      The Great Helmsman stood tall on the ship of hope, held the rudder and waved his mighty free arm in the air, the arm of final victory, the call of the journey home.     But the window was abandoned; no one was there to hear victory’ s call. And the Great Helmsman waited and gave the call for thirty- nine days but still nobody came.     But on the fortieth day, the mission was completed as Destiny had ordained and the ship was ready for her voyage. She set sail out of the harbour, out to sea, homeward bound, back towards the horizon that gave her birth. Wind in her sails, sail being drawn, she raced over the tossing waves, her course set for the departing sun.      She met the sun setting there at the horizon, where it had all began, the journey, the fall, and entered the glowing light, leaving behind forever, the abandoned window.                                                               Back to Prose Index