Mariel's Art and Sketches

In art, artist

There's a story that's been lingering in my mind for a while. From a simple feeling of being unable to move on from loss, into a soul's inexpressible hurt mingled with love and ambition.

On the coast is a town which is never quite famous, nor was it either unpopular. It was a simple little town where lives are more knitted together. Their lives revolve around the sometimes blue and sometimes gray sea, alongside its sibling, the unreachable sky.

Two young people live amongst the locals, outcasts despite their willingness to belong to a home. One is welcomed by some, the other feared for something he has that's never been his fault at all. Meryl and Zachary are their names. They're not true siblings to be honest. In an orphanage they've formed their own family amongst strangers, and found in each other the family that has forgotten they have lived at all.

People around town are nervous around young twelve-year old Zachary. Because you see, as they all say, he's not quite right in the head. Sees ghosts of our pasts, they've said over and over again in that same old superstitious tone that's all the rage in town. Pity he's not the same as his sister.

People like Meryl. She's normal like them, they say. Look at how hard she works at Murdoch's cafe! My, what a simple little beauty. But what the surface of the ocean shows, it also hides a deep and dark hurt no one would see unless they bother to look for it at all. And the problem was, no one ever does. So when a storm rages over their little and perfect town, a life was lost, and they never bothered to know why. All they care about is their own life. But as it was, their lives have been changed because of the boy they have feared, and they are unable to face the truths of what little Zachary have shared with them.

Ravaged from the storm, the town has attracted an ambitious journalist who would care for nothing other than for his own benefit. Nicolas Levine had wondered why no one ever told anyone outside of town of the single death that had occurred in that wrathful day in the sea, how there was supposed to be three lives that should have been claimed by the depths that day but only one had gone. Why? He asks himself over and over as each person he's asked about the story denies their knowledge of it. Was it too painful? Or was it a secret no one else should know apart from this little town by the coast? Why wouldn't they want anyone to know?

But aside from the secrets, this town also houses a family, embedded with old tradition, of love and hope. Years pass by after the storm's wrath, young William Murdoch have grown to love the girl who was left behind by her brother. Beginning to learn how to love, he sees the world in his innocent view, and yet after seeing the devastation of her soul, he quickly and deeply learns how to understand the world and the souls living in confusion and pain.

Meryl, whose heart have been torn into pieces that's already been broken before, struggles to live again. But what if suddenly, she stops trying?

This story has been with me for a long time now, and has been a part of who I am. If one ever considers copying, then one steals a part of my own soul. No one would want that.