#sandover

“Horizons”

In Torn's eyes were dreams of the distant sea; in hers, a memory of the sky.

The sun-warmed shores of Dover with its brilliant, blue-green shoals lapping at the golden sands; of the sweet summer breezes whirling in their hair and dancing in the dune grass.

Once, children flew kites and dug for Precursian beads on the beach.

Once, couples laughed and shoved each other into the surf, while the elders smoked their pipes and swapped stories in the cool shade of the jungle palms and passing clouds.

Once, their sleepy dream-world had a name...but no more. Instead, they remember and mourn a world that no longer exists.

All that remained of home stared back at them, held misty and distant in their own reflections, held safely in the other’s eyes.

Torn told himself that he could live in her memories forever, just as she had somehow moved quietly and sweetly into his dreams. Beyond their pain and grief was somewhere warm, somewhere safe, somewhere beautiful - a place beyond fear, that existed beyond the monsters and the soldiers and the toxic smog. A place both ancient and new, near yet far, in the path of the sun, where the sea met the sky.

Sometimes they would lay like that for what felt like forever, laughing and reminiscing until they both fell silent, just watching, re-living, yearning, their fingers barely brushing in the dark…

Tess closed her cloudy eyes, and the dream was gone. Torn kept watching as she slept, unable to forget a thing.

Content to stay awake, he eventually turned his gaze to the grimy ceiling, and his mind drifted beyond the stained concrete and empty, war-torn streets above them.

Together, they would keep dreaming of the long, lost shores of Dover, with its clear blue waters and vast, open skies that stretched into the horizon.