Young hearts
Saluting their goodbyes, billowing sails and swinging ropes sat nestled against an aging dock, littered with grime-smeared, but pristine crafts abandoned and fading into the distance. Eliza stood on her father's fishing vessel overlooking the waves, remembering her once joyous laughter with each spray of sullen salt. Her eyes searching perilously for her friend with the mournful smile, with hair of foaming white curls, a picture of blue ripples, delicate shells and forlorn emerald eyes trickling with tears of pearls.
Hiding a twinge of sadness, she rose up on stretching tiptoes staring down into the water, but no matter how penetrating her gaze, there was still no sign of the sea goddess, Aqua, only pollution and plastic shapes masquerading as soiled sea life.
Her brow puckered in thought, her eyes closing as Aqua's memories washed over her once again. Her thoughts clashing with the present sight of encroaching detritus, she remembered iridescent sea horses trembling alone in a darkening void. While white floating wings of suffocating plastic webs, consumed all with a voracious need. Many birds were tied up in packaged wrapping and fish impaled by plastic forks, inhaling breaths through unbending straws, their silent cries a ghostly echo among the dying and deceased. Colourful corals drained of vivid and flourishing life, left haunted in the deep. Blinking, her vision refocused and she returned her gaze to the rusted metal beneath her feet.
A familiar warmth touched her shoulder, solid and reassuring, without speaking her father stood by her side. Every day Eliza peered in to tainted waters with hope and yearning filling her heart. Her father had often told her the story of the sea goddess was just a myth, a fictional tale of sailors and nothing more. Yet Eliza refused to believe it, she had seen her sitting elegantly atop thick frothy waves, she had met Aqua's earnest effervescent eyes, baring an anguish of heart-rending pains.
Glancing out to sea, she shivered at the eerie silence and lacklustre currents, its strength and prowling presence weakened, and left to crawl in desperation. Tearful she began drying her still wet lashes holding bitter dew drops from mere moments ago, but yet more tears fell lingering in tender hope. Turning away she wished in vain for the expanding blight of humans peddling plastic, to also emerge as a simple myth, yet there she stood among numerous watery graves immersed in the harsh reality. Still, the belief in her heart kept her ever faithful, she would see to it that one day, another would write of a waging war against the invasion of human cast-offs, slaying the peaceful seas, she would be their wrought iron warrior, standing firm to crush this plastic plague.
Smiling through tearful eyes and twisting away from her father, she marched across the deck in determined strides, a single idea burning bright amid her gloom.
"Where are you going, Eliza?"
Pausing, she squinted, "to start training."
"Training... training for what?"
"To be an eco warrior of course!"
THE END
