Paul, I call upon the natural elements present, the ancestors of the traditional owners and all our friends and family with us today, to hear the raw honesty of my vow to you:

Darling, my friend, my desire; consider this a star chart that you may seek sail from at any time.

I love you stars and moons and will until I embrace the end of our immense universe.

You are my light and my darkness, my breeze and my cyclone, my ocean and my land, my storm and my rainbow: what better balance of nature could I hope for.
I give to you something that I have never given to anyone else: my true self, alone and adrift on the single, set, cell of a map, never to be investigated by anyone else.

This is the least and the most that I have to give to you. Nobody has ever discovered this place before and I have worked hard to keep it protected from the pirates of life.

I PROMISE that I will let you in to my most private quarter: the Captain's Cabin that is sacrosanct to all but the solitary salty dog seeking a palace of peace from a weather beaten existence. You are the only sailor ever allowed into my space: my fellow captain.

Even when my cabin walls are reinforced with cemented silence and cyclone bolts, I will call on the elements to tear them down and assault me with the terrifying rage of knowing there's nowhere to hide. I will see your image and allow you to remind me.

Forever more I seek my shelter in your wind of change. I will turn my face to the stinging salt spray that puffs my eyes and sniffs into my soul. I will stand up, strong, against the craggy, barren, wind swept, lonely horizon in the distance that has become so familiar to me that I have over identified with it and consciously become it: distant and solitary. Its comfort even seduces me now: show nothing, protect your inner self, beware of the rocks and go further out to sea, no one must enter. This pain of change, this song of the sea meets land, will be our rainbow.

I feel vulnerable sharing my inner thoughts. I will feel exposed when I begin to verse you of my intense fear, yet malnourished bravery, in allowing you into my most private space. I ask of you gentle reminders and acceptance of my truth as the gang plank away from the rocking ship and back toward the rain bowed horizon that encompasses people. However vulnerable I feel, you, Paul, are welcome in my space.

This is my promise to you.

Now can I have some Mungalli Cheese cake? They look bloody delicious!


If you wish to join the Writers Prompt Daily simply use the above photo as a prompt and post a short story, poem or paragraph to your blog. Leave a comment and the link here so that all participants can come to you and read/comment/encourage. Story above is copyright and is Megan Bayliss' writing around the above picture prompt.