ONE****
Once a man lived by the sea. Every morning he would walk down to the beach with a mug of some drink and listen as the world seemed to wake up. He would stand on the shore, just above the tide line, drink his drink and watch the waves roll up. When his drink was done, he would go inside again. Usually, he would not come out again for the rest of the day, until sunset, when he would come out again and watch the sun slowly drop below the horizon. He would have another drink in his hand, and usually he finished the last drop in his glass just as the sun disappeared; he often got to see the strange green flash that is said to light up the horizon line right when the sun finishes setting behind it. Then he would turn back toward his house, shoulders slumped, with the images of the sun's reflection on the ocean still burned into his eyes, and walk slowly up to the back porch of his house. He would go into the house at the top of the beach and not come out again that night. Sometimes he would be determined not to go down to the beach the next morning, or that night.

This was because he didn't know why he always went there, and was constantly trying to break the habit of going. But he always went. It was the first thing he did in the morning, every morning. He would get up, get dressed, make a hot drink for himself, and walk down to the beach to drink it while staring at the ocean. Sometimes, he got a strange feeling while he watched the sea. He felt like he was waiting for something.

Of course, he knew that nothing was going to come. What could there possibly be out there that was worth waiting for? Nobody ever came to see him even when he was on land; the town where he bought his food and anything else he needed was miles away, and nobody knew him there except by sight, and only a few of those who knew who he was actually knew his name or spoke to him every time he came to town. Nobody was certainly going to come to him from the sea.

But every morning and every nightfall, he would be standing out there on the strand, drinking something and watching the tide rise and fall on his beach.

**** For years he had tried to convince himself that he liked being alone. That had never worked, so he had told himself that he had best get used to it; he had been alone for much of his life.

He imagined that some people might think he was miserable, but as far as he could tell, he felt quite comfortable. He was used to having nothing else to fall asleep to at night but the sound of his own breathing. He ate his meals alone, read by himself, played music that no one else could hear... it was not a bad life at all, or at least, he never found it unlikable.

But something happened.

Gradually, he became aware of something unusual that was happening. After his cocoa was done, he would sometimes hesitate on the beach before going back up to the house. Occasionally he would simply stand quietly on the beach, as if stuck in the sand, and suddenly turn and go back into the house. He did not figure out that he was doing this until one morning he looked at his clock and realized he had been outside for over an hour. That evening, he started taking his flashlight out to the beach with him. He needed it. He stood on the beach, entranced, until the last reflections of the sun had faded and all the light that was shining on the beach came from his house. He went back into the house, wondering what was happening to him.

**** One day, without quite knowing why, he went into the town to purchase a wire-mesh screen and some nails. When he got home, he got his hammer out and proceeded to put up the screen around his back porch, facing the beach. The next day, he went to the town, bought a screen door and came back to install it at the top of his back-porch steps.

He turned for a moment to look at the beach while he was putting the screen door on the porch - and almost dropped the tool he was working with.

There were footprints on the beach. New footprints. The tide had been rising while he stood on the beach that morning; it had erased his own footprints, but whose were those? He was the only living soul for miles around. No one else could have been on that beach without him knowing about it; to make matters worse, when he went down to investigate, he saw that the footprints were very new. The person who made them had to have been there less than half an hour ago - by which time he had already been home for some time. He thought for a while, looking up and down the beach and seeing no one, looking out across the water and seeing nothing, then went back up and finished the job on the screen door.

**** After that, he began to spend all his time on his beach - or his back porch. There, closed off from annoying insects, he could spend his time watching the land or the water, to see if anything came from anywhere to his beach. There was occasional litter, but it drifted in on the tide, from places that were miles away. He would go down, clean it off the beach, go back to his porch and pick up the book he had been reading.

He had begun to think it had all been for nothing when he got the strange feeling again, more powerfully than ever: Now he was convinced that unconsciously he was indeed waiting for something. And from the evidence of the footprints, maybe something would come after all.

After some long days, the feeling had not abated in the least, but he was beginning to get depressed and wonder how much longer he had to wait. Then the day came when things changed.

TWO****
There was now a couch on the back porch, a ratty old one that no longer looked good indoors. But it fit the dark-green paint on the outside of his house, so onto the back porch it went. He had fallen asleep on that couch, with blankets wrapped around him, on a cool early summer night. The next morning, he woke to find fog covering the beach. He shivered a little, pulled the blankets around him more tightly, and picked up a book from the small side table. He was beginning to read, when something distracted his attention.

Somewhere beyond his beach, a lantern light was shining in the fog.

He leapt to his feet. Was it a boat?

It seemed so. The thing came closer to his beach, and he began to see it more clearly - a high-prowed rowboat, with the lantern hung from the front; one person sat alone in it, manning the oars. He thought to switch on the porch light, but realized that it would be impossible to the boater to turn her head and see it (for he could make out that it was a woman). So he pulled his coat a little tighter around himself, put on a pair of old loafers that lay next to the couch, and made his way down through the fog.

The woman was just coming up to the tideline, pulling the boat, when he reached her. Without a word, he stepped forward and took hold of the boat's prow. Together, they beached the boat beyond the tideline. He could not clearly see the face of the woman, until they reached for the lantern at the same time. He let her take it.

She held it up, as if to see him more clearly - but instead it revealed her face to him. She was beautiful; her hair was light and her eyes were of a deep blue - a color which looked very familiar to him, from his years of ocean-watching. She was dressed in some strange gauzy cloth that seemed to float about her in the faint wind that drifted across the beach. He wondered how he must look to her, with his unkempt dirty-brown hair, nearsighted squint and rumpled clothes.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She said nothing, but bent down to shine her lantern into her boat, looking for something.

"What are you doing here?" Again, she did not answer, but picked up a package from within the boat.

"Do you hear me?" the man said, feeling more uneasy by the second. "Why are you here?"

"Why are you here?" she replied, in a beautiful, soft voice. "That seems to be the real question: Why are you here?"

"If you keep refusing to explain yourself," he told her, trying to sound gruff, "I'll have to force you to leave my property."

"Your property?" the woman said, and laughed softly. "The beach is free to all. You are here, I think, because you were looking for something, waiting for something, on this beach."

"What?"

"Well, now something has come, yes?"

"...Yes. But what are you doing here?"

"I have been sent to comfort you," she said, in that soft voice that seemed to grow more beautiful with every word she spoke.

"Sent - by whom?"

"No matter. You will find out soon enough. Now, may I come in?" she asked, and turned toward the house without waiting for an answer.

After a few seconds, he sighed and began to walk alongside her, back up the incline of the beach to his house; two sets of footprints, one made by a pair of old shoes that dug deeply into the sand, the other made by two bare feet that left very little mark, followed them there. He offered to carry her mysterious package for her, but she insisted that she was strong enough to carry it herself. The door closed behind them.

Any other person who might have been there to witness the woman's arrival (had there even been any) could have said that no sooner than they entered the house together, the cheerful light of a roaring fire in his fireplace seemed to shine within, and laughter broke forth from the single open window on the bottom floor. Two people were laughing together. One was a deeper, more masculine laugh, almost unnecessarily loud and hysterical, as if it was being abruptly loosed after being strangled into silence for far too long. The other was magic; an innocent-sounding laugh, a childlike laugh, a laugh of pure delight.

**** He did not remember how long she stayed with him that first time, nor did he remember when she left. He could not recall helping her return the boat to the water. He only knew that in the morning (he did not know what morning) he awoke and found that she had disappeared. There was a note lying on his kitchen table: "I promise I will return." The note was signed with the most lyrical and beautiful name he had ever read or heard.

Going down to the beach, he found that the boat was gone. Likewise the lantern and the box she had brought his gifts in. But the gifts were still there, and he treasured them. And that night, he was able to sleep soundly and peacefully, and did not go to the shore to watch the sunset.

THREE****
Time passed, and she did not come again. Eventually, he found himself going down to the beach, rain or shine, to keep his twice-daily vigil. One morning, the sun was buried deep in clouds, and a light rain was falling; he stood on the shore for he did not know how long, simply listening to the pattering of the rain as it fell upon the sand and the surface of the waves. It was like no sound to be heard anywhere else, he thought.

The grayness of the sky inspired him sometimes, and upon going indoors he would take out a notebook and write for hours, or work on one of the paintings he would never finish. On occasion he would even sit down to play the guitar, though he had never been very good at it; he was better at the piano, but he had gotten rid of his piano years ago when it had gone permanently out of tune. Now he felt the urge to go in and play music all day. Perhaps that would drive away the gray sky, he thought, or at least make it easier to bear.

He went upstairs to the room where he slept, and took an old guitar and his guitar picks out of the closet. The strings were all slightly out of tune, and he fixed them one by one, trying to remember the right notes for each of them. A few slow chords, and he began to lose himself in the sound of the guitar. He did not meditate the way some did; he used a guitar in a quiet room. He did not know what place the song came from, only that it was inside his mind. The ocean whispered outside his window, and the only other sounds were the guitar and a soft humming that played counterpoint to the musical instrument. He stopped playing, though, when he suddenly realized that the humming was not coming from him.

He turned to the door, and no one was there. But when he looked out the window which faced the sea, he saw the rowboat being pulled up on the beach. The lantern at its prow shone brightly. From the beach, her voice could be heard, humming softly, as he tentatively continued to play.

As she approached the porch, he came down to the door and opened it, guitar still in hand. She was carrying another mysterious parcel. "That was a wonderful song," she said. "From far out at sea, I could hear it."

"I thought you'd never come back," he said to her.

"But I told you I would," she replied. "I like to keep my promises."

He let her into the den and went to light the wood in his fireplace while she set down her packages. He was just making sure that the flame had caught when he heard her pick up his guitar and sit down on the couch.

"Be careful, that thing is old," he said, turning around to face her - and he noticed a few strange things. First, that she was wearing the same gauzy, satiny dress as when he had last seen her, yet she did not look the slightest bit bedraggled by the rain that had no doubt fallen on her. Not a strand of her bright-blonde hair was still wet, let alone out of place. She was also holding the guitar as if she had been playing all her life. She fingered the strings of the guitar idly, paused a few seconds and then began to play.

He sank into a chair and listened, rapt, while she played a soft, quiet melody. She plucked at the strings with her fingers, never quite actually strumming a chord, but she was not improvising the way he would do it. She was playing a definite song with a definite melody; it wasn't just randomly running chords up and down the scale the way he usually did.

And then she sang. And hers was indeed the most beautiful voice he had ever heard.

She stopped after a few measures. A look of sadness and concern appeared on her face. "Is something wrong?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. He raised his eyes to her, and they were full of tears held barely in check. "Until now, I never believed there was such beauty in the world...."

"Beauty? You did not believe in beauty?"

"I knew there was such a thing," he told her. "But I never thought it would come to me."

"And that is why I am here," she said, the smile returning to her face. "I have been sent to comfort you." She began to play again.

"May I make one request?" She paused to hear him. "Please don't sing. It would be too much for me."

She smiled, nodded, and began to play again, remaining silent for a while. But, as though she could not control herself, she began to hum again, adding her voice to that of the guitar.

It was too much. The dam broke. He started to sob, loud, racking cries escaping his mouth. Hurriedly, she got up, lay the guitar down on the couch, and came over to him. "Are...are you all right?"

"No, I'm far from all right. Look at me. There is no place in my life for... for... this."

"You can make time for it. You have been going down to the beach to watch the sunset for as long as I can recall. What was that, if not an appreciation of beauty?"

"That was not why I went there. I went to the beach because I felt like I was waiting for something..." He looked around himself, at the gifts he had received from her previously, and at those laid out on the kitchen table in the next room. "And now that something is here, I feel as if it's too much - as if I have done nothing to deserve all this."

"That is NOT true," she said, frowning. "I came to you because this is what you needed. No one deserves to be alone for all time. That is why I came here to you." She placed one petite hand atop his. "You are not the only person I visit. There are more, a good deal more. But the reason I go to many of them is the same as yours - because the others are alone and need to be comforted."

She embraced him with deceptively strong arms. "Do not say that you are unloved or undeserving. Both are nothing short of blasphemy." She pulled back to look directly at him; for a second, he was struck again by the deep blue of her eyes. "You are loved; they all are loved. And as long as I know I am needed, I will not let you live alone."

He stared at her for a few seconds, then embraced her once more, even tighter, crying like a child. Saying 'thank you' did not seem enough to express his gratitude.

FOUR****
Time passed. He found himself going to the sea every morning. But he knew he was not waiting for her now. He knew she would come again. He simply went down to watch the sea, and remember that first meeting, helping her pull her boat from the waves and beach it above the tideline. He sometimes found himself thinking of other things as well - the first time he had seen footprints other than his own on the beach.

In the evenings he would sit on his porch with a small table in front of him and write letters. He had not done this in a very long time, and sometimes he was not quite certain where the letters were going. He had obtained the mailing addresses from places in the town - he did not recall exactly where they had been. Other addresses had been given to him in a package that she left. He now found himself going to the post office more often to check on his mail, and found more of it waiting all the time.

But eventually something happened to him that he could not understand. He found it impossible to explain what was happening to him. People in the town who knew him well kept commenting, over and over again, that he seemed to have changed. He began to grow sick of hearing it. And every time he asked why they thought he was different, he got the same answer: "You seem to smile a little more than everyone else. You talk more, you act much more amiable and open.... But at the same time, you seem a little too emotional. You have this strange look in your eyes, and when someone tells a joke you laugh a little too loudly. A lot of us think that you're going crazy."

One afternoon, he was sitting in his den reading, when suddenly something hit him. "A lot of us think that you're going crazy...." Was that really what they had said? Did they really think he was crazy? What if he was going crazy? Was he imagining the times when she came to him? He couldn't be. But he was a different person, and he wondered if changing was such a good thing. The man he used to be was disappearing.... and he didn't want to disappear. Better to remain the way he was forever than to become something new and fearsome, he thought. And other thoughts came down on him too, stinging like a hail of bricks, and on each brick inscribed the words YOU'RE GOING CRAZY....

So that night, after the sun had set, he went down to the ocean again. There was nothing there. And he began to walk, fully clothed, into the water.

He did not care what anyone would think if they saw him now, trying to swim out to sea in autumn weather, with all his clothes on. Would they say again that he was crazy? Probably. But he himself did not think it was crazy.

It was supposed to be suicidal.

"Are you sure you're not going a little funny in the head?" he heard someone ask in his head. He had heard people asking him these things, as if they did not care that he might be - would be - insulted. Soft. Funny in the head. Eccentric. Weird. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.

He kept swimming. Let them think I'm crazy, then. They'll never have to see me again.

He grew tired, felt his strength diminishing. He was too exhausted to look back and see how far from shore he had gotten. And he did not really care, either. He came to rest and floated on his back, incapable of summoning the strength to do anything else. He found himself staring up at the night sky. He admired it a little. The strength to continue swimming had left him completely. Nothing left but to lie on the deep water and watch the stars until he became too weak even to float.

He could not tell how long he had been lying there, but he suddenly felt himself start to sink. The water was growing higher around his face. Salt water entered his mouth and he sputtered a little, but did not struggle. He gasped one last time before his mouth went under. One last inhalation of fresh air before the nose went under too. And he closed his eyes, lest the seawater sting them when the rest of him went under.

He slowly started to drift under the water. He could feel the darkness around him, even despite the numbness of his limbs in the cold water. Then, as he opened his eyes, an odd thing happened. He had been half hoping and half fearing it would happen. A light, passing over the surface of the waves far above, came to rest somewhere overhead. He vaguely heard a splash high above. Then silhouetted in the light from the surface, a shapely female form dove into view, hair streaming behind it, the strange fabric of its clothes translucent in the light. It paused a few seconds, treading water as if looking hesitantly for something, then pushed off and swam straight towards him. It caught him by the arm, taking his left hand in its own, then turned in the water and kicked a few times, propelling itself and pulling him in the direction of the surface.

When they broke the surface, he heard her take in a few breaths. Dazed, he was unable to do the same for a second or two, then spat out copious amount of water and found himself gasping for air. The inrush of oxygen was a little too much for him, and he blacked out completely.

He remembered very few things after that. There was an image he recalled very clearly, of lying in the bottom of a boat, looking up at the stars and hearing the splashing and creaking of oars, which came to a stop; there was a little fumbling and a loud clank, and then she came into view holding the lantern over him. She looked for a few seconds, her face showing concern, then smiled. "You will be fine," she said. Then his memories grew faint again. He recalled the sound of a boat being pushed up on a beach, and the sound of footsteps going up the beach, but other than that, nothing came back to him afterwards when he tried to remember it.

**** When he became coherent again he was lying on the couch in his den. A tremendous fire was blazing in the fireplace, and he was wrapped in a blanket; almost all of his drenched clothes were laid out in front of the fire. She was sitting by the fire, idly (or nervously) prodding at the logs with the iron poker. He blinked, and she turned around and saw him.

"What a relief," she said, crawling over to him. "I was wondering when you would wake up."

"Am I still alive, then?"

"Of course you are. For a while I was afraid you would not make it. The sea is cold tonight."

"Why did you save me?"

"It is not my place to be concerned for myself. I am here to help you."

"But I didn't want to be saved."

"Why?"

"Because...." He thought for a second. "I don't know. I don't know why I did it."

"No, you know quite well why you did it. You are only trying to hide it from me - and not with much success."

"Fine. I did it because people are starting to look at me as if I'm some sort of lunatic. They know nothing about you, and I can never tell them anything about you without sounding like a lunatic, either."

"They think you are insane, simply because you are starting to change?"

"Yes, but you are the reason why I'm changing. And they see that I'm changing, and they see the trouble I have handling it, and they begin to think that I'm running off the rails...."

"You are changing because you have no wish to be alone," she said, and moved up to sit next to him on the couch. "They do not understand you. They cannot, because they do not know that you are discovering something that to them has long been commonplace, even vulgar. You had no contact with anyone for a very long time; you were alone for so long that such a simple joy as human contact was lost to you - forever, or so you thought. There was no one to whom you could speak and be spoken to as an equal. And you should never have been denied such a chance."

"And so you were sent."

"Yes. To teach you, and to make you unafraid."

He turned and stared into the fireplace. He could not tell whether he felt cold or warm, but he was alive.

She stayed with him all that night, all the next day, and on into the next night. They did almost nothing except talk, the whole time. He found himself unburdening himself to her almost completely; she was as understanding as humanly possible. Even when he said something she did not agree with, she shrugged it off with equanimity.

What he found so unusual was that, despite talking so much with her, he heard very little about her personally. She spoke of the others she visited from time to time, but very little of herself. It was as though she had no self left, because she gave of it so lovingly to all these nameless others whom he had never seen....

And when she departed, it was with the same kind of subtlety as ever. He fell asleep in the middle of the night, and when he awoke she was gone again. He felt no sorrow at her departure this time. He only felt gratitude.

FIVE****
He spent his days waiting again, but now he truly had a reason for wanting her to come back, besides just feeling lonely and wanting to talk. She had done a great deal for him, and what had he done to deserve it? "Nothing," she had said to him. "And there was nothing you needed to do. I come simply to give comfort to people because they need me, not because they have earned me."

But he felt guilty about never doing anything for her. What could he do, anyway? Then he had an idea... an idea that merited fulfillment. He set to work, and counted the days until she returned.

**** One foggy afternoon, the light of a lantern came rolling in with the tide. Coming down from the house, he saw that it was indeed her again. He helped her beach the skiff, then asked her in. "I have something to show you," he said.

"Certainly," she said, and returned with him.

Inside, a desk in the far corner was littered with papers, covered over and over with crossed-out or half-erased phrases of different lengths. A number of pencils were laid out haphazardly around the room, as if flung randomly at odd times. "Sorry," he said, picking up a few pencils and scattered sheets of paper; "I know the place is a mess."

"Why all this disorder?" she asked.

"Well, uh... I was working on this." He crossed over to the desk, where the papers had been pushed aside to make room for a single piece of parchment paper. Next to that was an inkwell and a pen with the sort of nib used for calligraphy. He picked up the parchment, which was covered with deceptively simple blue-inked letters, and walked slowly over to her. "You can read this. I doubt I have the nerve to read it aloud myself without choking on the words."

He watched her face intently as she slowly eased over to the nearest chair and sat in it, silently reading the lines of the poem he had written:

"'DUM VIVO AMO ET DUM AMO VIVO' -=- A sonnet

"In life you love, and while you love you live;
I see you smile and I don't know why;
Your friends accepting all you have to give
From that great heart that's bigger than the sky.

"The universe is smiling from above
And watching those who to their hearts are true,
Sound mind, sound body, soundest in their love;
And most of all it smiles on those like you.

"It gives us certain talents, and we're meant
To use them, so I know it must be proud
Of one whose soul I'm sure was heaven-sent;
She may not stand tall, yet her heart sings loud.

"There isn't room on Earth for all you give;
In life you love, and while you love you live."

**** She sat silently, and he was shocked to realize that, despite the faint smile on her face, her hands were trembling almost imperceptibly, and tears were forming in her eyes. "Wh...what is it?" he asked tentatively. "Are you all right?"

She remained silent. A tear leaked out of one eye and trickled down her face. The faint smile was disappearing gradually.

"I haven't... offended you, have I?" he said, staring down at the floor in front of him, feeling his heart sink like a lead weight into his stomach. "Have I done something wrong?"

"No," he heard her say, in a quavery, choked-up voice very unlike her usual soft, calm manner. "Nothing is wrong. Only - Only - "

Suddenly she leapt up from her seat, dashed forward and, weeping openly, wrapped him in the tightest embrace he had ever felt in his life. "This is - is the most beautiful thing - anyone - anyone has ever done for me!" she gasped out between sobs. "Thank you so much! You - you have no idea how much this means to me... Thank you... Thank you... thank you - oh!!" Suddenly, as if on a random impulse, she reached up to his face, took it in her hands, and kissed him on the cheek.

In his mind, the entire world froze for a split second. He could hardly even blink. When his awareness came back to him, he found that he was still in her arms. Her deep-blue eyes were a little red around the rims, and the tracks of her tears were still glistening visibly on her face, but she wore a sweeter and happier smile than he had ever seen before, if such a thing could be possible.

"It was so beautiful," she said. "So beautiful, so wonderful. It touched me." She placed a hand over her heart. "I would never have known you were such a wonderful poet if you had not so opened your heart to me."

"If not for you," he said, "I could never have done it."

SIX****
For a while he was happy still. He had continued to receive letters in the mail from his friends and correspondents far away, and once he had been stunned to receive a letter from her. He had recognized it by the handwriting (and its lack of a return address), and when he opened it he had found a letter of appreciation from her, in the most beautiful calligraphy he had ever seen. She had signed it with her true name again, the dear name by which he had only dared to call her once. But her name haunted his dreams. He felt both exhilarated and uneasy when he whispered it under his breath.

And he was certain of one thing - the dear name did not belong to a creature that was of this world. He had tried to look it up in various lexicons, and the only relevant definitions he could find were an identification of a star from a well-known cluster that he often saw in the night sky, and a vague reference to a class of spiritual entities from ancient myth. This last was enough to arouse his suspicions, and the more he thought about this theory, the more sense it made. He intended to ask her point-blank what her name meant.

And despite such pragmatic ideas, his heart still rose when he saw the lantern steadily sailing through the fog yet again, and he hurried down to his beach to pull the boat to shore.

**** "My name?" she asked. "Why should my name be such a matter of concern to you?"

"Call it simple curiosity," he replied. "I want to know what it means."

"It means many things in different languages," she told him. "In the language from which my name was taken, it means 'the child of the Sun.'" He gave a start - he had never heard this, nor seen it defined in any of his dictionaries.

"But in days long forgotten it signified a being of pure spirit, wiser and higher than most of humankind. In the religion in which you were raised, I suppose they would be known as angels." He smiled when he heard her say this; what he had imagined was true, after all.

"And in farther lands than I have ever visited, it means - why are you smiling like that?"

"Don't you see?" He raised his hands. "Maybe it means 'child of the sun' in one language, but in another it means 'angel.' I don't know about the one, but you certainly fit the description of the other...."

She cocked an eyebrow at him, looking both pleased and slightly puzzled.

The words fell from his mouth in a rush. "Are you an angel?"

"What?" she said.

"You can't be human. You've always appeared when I've needed to see you most. And there are things about you that don't seem - well, earthly."

"Perhaps I am an angel," she replied, smiling sweetly. "And perhaps I am not."

"It makes no difference," he said. "To me, you're an angel, no matter what else you might really be."

She looked at him for a few moments, blinking, then leaned in and held him tightly as they looked into the fire. He was to remember that embrace and feel it every day for a long time to come, and well he did to remember it.

For after that night, she never came again.

**** There was never an explanation. She had sent a few letters, but there was (of course) no return address, and in them she had given no indication that she might cease one day to write or to call upon him again.

Sometimes, out of whimsy, he would write long letters to her, using his best and most elegant handwriting. He actually wrote with sheets of carbon paper under each page, however, so his occasionally dull memory would not fail to recall what exactly he had said.

When he sent the letters off, too, he had no idea where they were going. He had written the return address of his own postbox on each letter, and for the mailing address, he had given the dear name, and no other clue as to its destination. He blindly trusted each letter to find its way to her; as far as he could tell, it might even be working, since none of his letters had been returned to the postbox, opened or unopened.

But he began to wonder what had become of her, or those letters, anyway. Perhaps the post office was simply disposing of them. Or if the letters had in fact been received by her, might she not be hoarding them unopened? What other reason could there be for her silence?

He found himself going to the beach again every morning and every evening. Weeks went by. A few months went by. And still the lantern did not appear near his beach, bobbing and weaving through the fog. He saw nothing.

**** He grew suspicious. He began to send letters to certain penfriends whose names and addresses he had received from her; he inquired of them if they had heard anything from her, or received her in their homes, in the recent past.

The replies were both disturbing and disheartening. She had not visited any of them for several months. No word from her. No one had seen or heard anything.

It was as though she had disappeared from the face of the earth.

More worried than ever, he began to go down to the beach more often, as many as three or even five times a day. He began to spend more time on these little trips down from the house. He spent hours staring at the sea. Eventually he was spending more time sitting on the beach, watching the waves roll in, than he was spending anywhere else. Even at night he sat, watching Sirius rising and setting; the same book that had defined the dear name had also told him that long ago, Sirius had also been known as Arundel.

He took a trip one day to the library, doing research for a book he was writing. He found a word in his researches that confused him. It began with the letter M. Flipping through the nearest dictionary (a version he had never used before), he was startled to see a word go by that resembled the dear name. He turned back to it hurriedly and read each definition, wondering why he had never seen this word before, nor associated it with her. His heart began to sink: it was first defined as the name of a goddess from a religion he had heard little of, but also: "illusion, or the illusory world of the senses, often personified as a woman." This word was pronounced exactly the same as the dear name, and he began to wonder whether she had intentionally misspelled her name when she had signed her name to anything she had written.

Perhaps, he thought on the way back to his home, she was an illusion - and all that she brought with her was an illusion too. No, he thought when he got home and looked round him; he had benefited too much from knowing her to simply dismiss her as an illusion now. Could he wait until she returned?

He thought that he could. He also thought that he had little choice in the matter.

SEVEN****
He continued to wait on the beach for long periods of time every day. Never was there any sign of her return. Not even a letter offering an explanation. She had vanished.

One evening, after the sun had set, he reached up to scratch an itch on his face and discovered his beard was full of sand. For a few moments he had no idea how it got there, but he felt very stiff when he tried to stand up, then touched his shoulder and felt the dull, blurry pain of a sunburn shoot up and down his arm - and he realized suddenly that he had been watching the sea from his position above the high-tide line for the entire day with little to no rest. In fact, he could hardly remember his last time inside the house. He went back up to the house, knowing he would regret it in the morning; but in the morning, despite the sunburn and the stiffness in his joints, he combed the sand absentmindedly out of his facial hair, then dragged himself out onto the porch to watch the beach again.

She did not come that day, or that week.

He questioned, at the end of the week, why he so badly desired to see her again. It couldn't be plain old lust - no, their relationship had not been about sexual desire; it had been something more platonic than that. Yet why was this longing so strong?

He realized then that it was not simple longing. It was love. A fairy-taleish kind of love, without any sexual undertones. She had given freely to him, not of her body, but of her heart and soul. She had apparently done the same for others too, in total selflessness. And he was wishing and waiting for a chance to truly return the favor.

He did not know what she might think if she knew he loved her. She might welcome him and offer her friendship to the end, which was as much as he really wanted out of her... or she might be terrified by his emotional outbursts and flee into the mists and disappear again, this time for even longer. But he hoped she would be understanding; she was nothing if not understanding.

And so he continued to watch the beach faithfully. He intended to go on looking out on the sea every day until she returned. He watched on fair days and rainy days, windy days, cloudy days, and especially on the days (and there were many) when thick mists rolled in upon the beach.

But fog or no fog, she never did come back. He watched in vain for days, weeks, months - it dragged on for years. And finally he had had enough; his heart was being rent in pieces, and he could not stand it as much as a single second longer.

**** So one night, after the sun had set, he went down to the ocean again. There was nothing there. And again he began to walk, fully clothed, into the water.

He swam far, fast, determinedly, until he felt his strength diminishing. He was too exhausted to look back and see how far from shore he had gotten. He came to rest and floated on his back, incapable of summoning the strength to do anything else. He found himself staring up at the night sky. He admired it a little. He could even clearly see a group of stars, one of which shared the dear name. The strength to continue swimming had left him completely. Eventually, he became too weak even to float.

He felt himself start to sink. The salt water was growing higher around his face. He did not struggle against it now, as he had not struggled then. He began to take in a few stubborn breaths of air before sinking beneath the waves.

With his last exhalation came his last word before his face disappeared into the seawater. He spoke the dear name. The name of a night-sky star, the name of the child of the Sun, the name of a kind of angel, the name of a goddess, the name that sounded like the name of an illusion.

His last word above water was her name: "Maiya."

**** Little is left to tell. There were those who came to his house in the end; they found little of value or importance there except for a guitar, an album of old photographs, a collection of letters, and other miscellanea. As far as they could tell, there were no real clues to his disappearance.

They found a place where a boat had been beached on the shore behind his house. Small footprints - a girl's, they imagined - still remained on the smooth surface of the beach above the tideline. The width of the strides led them to believe she was running. Returning to the house, they found a note in the fireplace; most of it was charred, but what was left of the page was rambling and incoherent, when not splattered into incomprehensibility by drops of water. Perhaps they had been tears, someone suggested, but there was no explanation as to who might have been crying.

Slower footprints returned to the place where the boat had been, and its occupant had presumably shoved out to sea thereafter. After that, little remained to be investigated at his house, although there was still no way of explaining where he might have gone to, or who might have come to visit him. Someone mentioned that fog had set in the previous night in that vicinity, but no one could see how that might have been relevant. Mystified, they left, locking the house until a more thorough investigation could be conducted.

**** "Once a man lived in misery by the sea. He was comforted by the Maiya, but when it departed forever from him, a great and unbearable sadness overtook his heart. He offered his life to the sea from which the Maiya came, and the sea took him. In death he found oblivion, and surcease from the pain of his heart. For the only way to escape the longing for the Maiya is through death; the Maiyar bring happiness surpassing any known to mankind, but all happinesses must end, as must all leaves fall someday. It tears at the Maiya's own heart to see such sacrifices of love, but it is almost always helpless to prevent them; its own love for humanity will not allow it to stand idly while so many suffer in loneliness and solitude. It is not human; it loves as freely and unselfishly as no human being can love, and the love that a human being can give in return seems inadequate next to it. This is its blessing, and its awful spell. For as the man knows who sees the light upon the sea, to love and be loved by a Maiya is the sweetest curse, the most heavenly condemnation known to all the world."

**** Jacob Churosh, Friday 24 January 2003.

This work is dedicated to P.*, wherever she may be today. I thank you for opening my eyes to true beauty, for showing us all a good time, for being the personification of enthusiasm, and for having been a true Maiya to me and to so many others. - Also to any other, more real Maiyar with such powers... may your power to enchant never diminish, but may it never cause pain to those who fall under your spell. Blessed be, in the name of whatever mysterious forces rule this universe - for I was blessed a hundredfold to have known you all.

*(also known as A.S. If she reads it I hope she will know. \|8`)' )

This work � 2004 Jacob Thomas Churosh.