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[Cezanne Abella]

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“Look, Papa!” The young dark-haired girl held up a leaf of parchment that fluttered in the sea-misted air.

Her father, a dark-skinned man in his late twenties, smiled down at her, noting words written in the halting penmanship of his five-year-old daughter. “Si si, Mi Vida. I’ll look at it later. Right now I have to make the ship go.”

The young girl squinted in the glare of sunlight that rippled off the water and looked up at the billowing sails. “I thought the wind made the ship go.”

“The wind fills the sails, Mi Vida, but I must keep the sails pointing the right direction. Otherwise we’ll never make it home.” He saw the crestfallen look on the little girl’s face for just a fleeting moment before her expression brightened again and she lay down on the deck to continue her writing.

***

Cezanne awoke as she had so many times before. Always too soon, always before she and her father had ever arrived home again. She sat up in the bed, looking around her in an attempt to remember where she had fallen asleep. The room in Hanse’s Hostel was small but comfortable.

Twenty years later, and still the same dream. Why won’t it just leave me alone? Though Cezanne knew why. This was all she had left of her father. She sometimes wondered what he looked like now, if he ever thought of her, or if he ever missed her mother. He was probably a salty old sea dog by now, swearing and drinking and falling in love with the sea all over again, each and every day..

That was the day he left, and it was the memory of him that she held closest to her heart. “Mi Vida,” he’d said, “someday you will understand. You will find your truest love and you must hold fast to it. Never let it go. That one true love is the only thing that will ever fill your heart and make your spirit glow.” And he did glow that day. Her mother had not cried. She knew, as Cezanne did now, that the sea was his one true love. A gypsy girl who loved the earth with every fibre of her being could never love the sea the way he did. They married too young, and they had both come to understand the way of the world.

And so the gypsy girl returned to Minoc to raise her child among those she knew and loved. She went forth, hell bent on instilling a love for nature, music and art in the dark-haired girl whose wide eyes brimmed with tears as her father stepped onto the boat for the first time without a promise to return.

Cezanne rose from her bed, now far too alert to fall asleep again. The dawn tore daintily at the edge of the horizon as she lit a candle and sat down at the desk in her nightclothes. She opened her journal and dipped a quill in ink, pausing thoughtfully and searching her memory for accuracy before committing the thought to parchment.

That one true love is the only thing that will ever fill your heart and make your spirit glow…
And so I write.