Desolation

A sheet of paper as blank as my mind awaits inspiration.

Gradually my surroundings change and I find myself at the centre of a white wilderness.
A wilderness whose inhospitable landscape stretches endlessly from horizon to horizon flat and unbroken. Its sheer emptiness and desolation forces itself on my senses intimidating me.
Tears well from my eyes and freeze, glinting like diamonds in the midnight sun.

Unknown to me a kindred spirit looks back from the emptiness of space.

Floating without direction in the endless void he drifts unseen and unheard, his lifeline severed.
His visor reflecting briefly, a shaft of light from a distant star.
All the while a voice in his head screams over and over I am alone. Dear God he prays, if you are near to me stretch out your hand.
Beneath his endless passage through the heavens waves rise from the ocean depths in mountainous form, and the blue whale dives for cover fifty fathoms below.

Amid thundering troughs an Albatross glides on outstretched wings, held aloft by an Arctic wind seemingly oblivious to sleet being driven unmercifully across this desolate and unforgiving wilderness of water. High in the rigging of a sailing ship seafarers cling to safety lines for dear life, and tremble.
White horses race for the ill named Cape of Good Hope.
Yet amid such desolation there exists an oasis, where for a time such feelings can be laid to rest. When the limit is reached and sanity threatens to depart, man's indomitable spirit comes to the fore.