Looking back now, it seems like a dream – hardly tangible, somewhat blurry, and more than slightly askew on the shelf of my memory. But one thing it does not have is the disjointed quality that most dreams posess. It was there and around me, and that I cannot forget.

I followed her from the little cabin when she left that night – stealthily, cat-like, she crept down the rotting planks of the makeshift boardwalk, down, down, to where the sand became wet and firm underneath our feet.

Barely breathing, I watched her raise up her hands to the sky, heard her singing even as the words were carried away on the crest of the wind.

And then the staircase. Both opaque and translucent at the same time, it seemed to materialize out of the very air itself, looking shiny and almost wet – as though it had been formed out of the prescence of the ocean.

I watched, as she ascended.

And when I woke up in the morning, there was only one set of footprints on the beach, where I knew there should have been two.