Message In A Bottle

They sat at the sea-shore knowing that the time to bid farewell had arrived.
"Each time you leave me with more questions than answers," he complained.
"You, no more, sort things out for me," she retorted. "No longer do you iron out my doubts, fold neatly my dilemmas and no more do you leave me well-stocked on enough clarity to face life."
"You will need a housekeeper for that, my love," he teased her in reply. "Not me."

"Time flies when we are together," she pondered.
"I wonder if time flies," he replied, "Or if it is feelings which have flown?"
With a heavy heart she sighed, "What can I say? I know I have to let go of you as we depart to distant shores. I know a part of me aches when there seems no ache of parting in yours."
He simply smiled, "I have witnessed many more partings than you; yet in each parting, I experience an ache anew. If  you were to move from your head to your heart, you would feel it too."

She looked at him with tear-filled eyes and poured out all that she had stored in her heart, "There used to be a time when we would exchange messages in bottles made of sighs. I would float my feelings on a thought and you would catch and expand them on your island. Thus, we were tied across the waves of life...But these days, why do I feel as if we are caught up in separating tides?"
His voice remained calm as his eyes shifted in a thoughtful gaze, "Yes, there was a time when you floated your feelings of heart-felt desire. But these days, you have started building a ship to endure doubts within those very sighs. You guard the bottle of doubts, not allowing the contents to float away. There's only so much a bottle can hold - doubts or desires - choose one to drop away."
"Would you rather I allow my desires to find their own way?" she quizzed.
He replied, "How does one sail through life without a compass of security to show the way?"

She stayed silent, settled in her bottle. He stared silent, at the lap of the waves. In the absence of intent, the currents of life drifted them away to where stories without ends somehow find their place.