There's a blank space in her head, a small chunk of her memory and personality gone, and she picks at it with her musings and music, wanting and not wanting to know what was once there. She can't remember why it happened, and she has a gut feeling that she doesn't want to - that instead she should just barrel forward with her life and worry about the past later, and from a safely distant vantage point - but she also wants to embrace the unknown. This is the same tendancy that forces her to climb heights that frighten and read books knowing she'll have nightmares, a slightly massochistic trait.

The seat of the passenger van has crumbs of sand on it that are grinding into her skin. She does her best to ignore this.

She attempts sleep, but her eyes are feeling for the sky, constantly opening and searching the cloudy sapphire depths for answers. She secretly feels as if a certain wispy pattern will show her everything she's been looking for, alighting her imagination with thoughts of airborne wonders and impossibilities, but also explaining her life in a way that is gentle and simple.

A memory, a distraction, explodes into her conciousness, and for a moment she is wracked by indignation, fear, anger, and pain...but this is a regular thing, and just as she suspected, it passes, and it is just another second of recognition among many that have randomly gripped her for months now.

She can remember her last night on the beach: the waves were crooning with the voices of stones falling and leaves shaking, a sound that she could say with absolute certainty was the only tune that could penetrate straight to her heart. The brilliant yellow moon, hovering like a deity among insubstantial gray clouds and sharp stars, cast it's eerily irresistible glow out across the waters like a golden path laid out for the brave walker. She had gazed intently down it's length into the glowing darkness far beyond her sight, enchanted forever, and forever wondering what would happen if she followed it...surely death, but perhaps death was the ocean, and the ocean encompassed death, and those who were swallowed became a part of something majestic and enticing. The thought was tempting enough to draw her feet into the water and to toy with the meaning of true freedom.

The undertow tugged gently, knowing that the battle was already won, and that she would be back.