The waves rocked under the boat with a subdued motion. Waves are patient; they gently nudge, calmly suggest, lap delicately at your toes. But beware of those waves. Ultimately, they and their accomplice Time render all things to sand, be it rock, granite or mountains. Today these waves are my last comfort. Time is drawing short, so I needn’t fear their patient insistence. Warm sun, balmy day, friendly waves: you are my only remaining friends. Perhaps the iron beside me, too, is a friend, but he is more a merciful doctor, assisting Fate in her designs. No, you are not a friend, my iron. You do not move in gentle, easy ways. With one push you compel me to follow: down, down, beneath the rolling waves, through deeps too horrifying to imagine… But my waves never frighten; they destroy without menace, unknowingly, their intentions veiled in a thousand-year vigil. But my iron, he strikes with heated determination — so I call him merciful. He is merciful for what will end here today. It has been too long; my mind avoids the awful chore of thinking: Katherine. Deadly Katherine. She too was unaware, unknowing in her steady drain on a man’s soul. As if my heart were stolen grain by grain, evaporated under the steady gaze of a burning sun. I was drawn in like a naive child, playing in waters too deep, not considering the current. And today: welcome to my madness. The masculine responds to the feminine. Soft, considerate destruction is replaced by one last act of determined living. An act to end it all, without discussion — without banter. Again the waves beckon me. They say, “Wait dear friend, consider not your sorrow. Take solace in our constant companionship. We are dedicated, without condition.” And I respond, “Dedicated to what, pray tell?” They glint with a reflected smile, “Dedicated to you, dedicated to you…” On such a summer day, with a sun that warms to the marrow, and a soft, suggesting wind that might sprout seeds it was so nourishing, I would ordinarily accept, and accuse no more my delightful surroundings. But today, of all days, my ears were attune to things I had not heard before. Katherine’s blade was still lodged deep, and in its telling feel I scented another voice, hidden beneath the voice I heard. “Dedicated to you…” It transmogrified in my mind into a dark and sinister thing, more horrifying than anything my mind had ever imagined. What horrified me most was exactly that choice of verb: “dedicated,” as a killer is “dedicated” to his prey, a virus “dedicated” to its host — dear Katherine “dedicated” to me. Dedication wears like the feet of a million solemn pilgrims to their sacred land: stones are worn to pebbles, glass smoothed to bits, lines erased and all sharp edges dulled. Anything male, definite, defined, stable, unbroken, becomes shattered beneath the innocent weight of each individual foot multiplied over time. A billion billion feet, each placed carefully, an unwitting accomplice to the next, adding up to a sum never imagined by any part. I had become Katherine’s Mecca, and through the course of her steady visits she wore away everything that was me. “Be calm,” said the clouds. “Be enduring,” spoke the winds. But I answered, “That is not my way. I am what I am: a man. I ask for no recompense, no consideration. Hand me fate on a good day to die, and I will embrace it with two hands and carry it off to my altar. There I will sacrifice to gods too strange for any woman to consider. But in a woman’s softness, her waiting, and silent expectation — I find a grim death too strange for me to face. Give me anything, but let me face it. That is the way I know.” They looked back at me with sorrowful faces, my summer friends, and considered long and hard the choices open to me. Then finally one of them — I know not which — conspired with my iron, and gave me the gift I had longed to give myself: the gift of decision. As I spiraled downward into the murky deep I realized that my own personal hell was that I didn’t choose it for myself.