Christina dried a cup and put it in the nearly empty cabinet. It was warm for a June morning, she thought, and brushed a wisp of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. She walked to the window, unlatched it, and swung it open to let in the morning air. She lingered there, leaning against the sill, to breath in the sea breeze and look across the bay. Her thoughts turned to Brian. "I miss you, my love," she said in a voice barely audible.
The old beach house was empty nine months out of the year, and barely livable, but Christina had come there every summer since she was a child. Then the beach had been alive during the summer. Her family had owned a dozen or more brightly painted beach houses and rented them out to families from the north during the season. They were already in disrepair and getting hard to rent when a hurricane took most of them, along with the family's security. Her father died shortly afterwards in a boating accident, and her mother promptly lost her mind. The relatives moved her mother to a rest home where people told her when to eat and when to change her clothes.
With the summer people gone, and her family too, the beach became a different place, but Christina continued to come year after year -- mostly out of inertia -- though none of the rest of the family did. She stayed alone in the one remaining house along the remote stretch of oceanfront and wondered what had become of the life she had hoped for.
She tried to hold a picture of Brian in her mind to ease the loneliness. Tall he had been, with black hair that blew in the wind. She could feel his hand in hers as they walked along the beach at sunset with the sand pipers scurrying about. She thought of them together on his boat – a yacht, yes a yacht – for Brian had not only been handsome and gentle, but wealthy. And how he had loved her, perhaps more than she loved him. Then that fateful day, another storm like the one that washed away her family's best days, had taken Brian this time. Lost at sea, without a body to bury – just a memory of their happy life together to see her through the rest of her days.
Oh, Christina knew it wasn't true. But it was somehow easier to bear a life without love when she pretended it once had been hers.
The End
I wrote the piece above when the Salvador Dali painting was given as a daily prompt in my freewriting group. Every day we must write something using the prompt given.