[ WP ] Make me cry .

The Ocean in Texas is not the beautiful sight I had always imagined. The murky waters stained with oil and mud bring to mind the pitiful lakeside'beaches' of my childhood. The waters stretch on and on in the distance, but the sight of it is nothing thunderous. Nothing awakens in me, staring at that tainted sea. I can not see the fish jumping out of the water, nor the happy smiling people that surround me. I see only the dirt-brown of that water and the blinking lights in the distance marking the ever-churning oil rigs. My only thoughts are of the pollution, my every breath hanging, catching, wheezing as I try to ignore the thickness of the air. There is salt in it, but something else too, something that makes me want to gag, as if the air itself had sensed the hopelessness of this town. 
 
 Galveston, Texas. A pit. I came here to relax, to escape the world for a bit. I chose my vacation spot poorly. 
 
 The entire town has been rocked by the hurricanes that seem desperate to scratch off this tiny port, buildings stand precariously on stilts and the only people you can see on the street stare down and, coughing, shift away from you. I can not see the appeal of this place. People pass me by on the beach, laughing, smiling, jumping, energized by the ocean and enthralled by the history of the place that they are in. 
 
 I do not see the beauty of these homes, but the ghosts that linger on. Echoes of a time and place where man rebelled desperately against nature. Etchings and markings of a people that made a stand against the waters and lost. I can see the faded remains of trees, stripped away by storms and carved in memorial. These monuments are works of art, as ornate as they are beautiful. One in particular stands outside a house as old as the Island- or so it seems. Hundreds of birds, native to these lands, flow forth from a stump of a tree, each feather hand carved and carefully lain with the others. Beaks pointed in every which way, each bird following the others in a wave of nature forming into the fingery shadow of the old Oak that once stood in its place. It is a monument to nature. An apology. The final flight of the birds that once roamed these shores. 
 
 This place is dying. I do not know why I have come to this place, desperate to feel some of that fancy I felt as a child. Some of the wonder and excitement of it. But now I see this place with clear and cynical eyes, starved of joy. The town is falling apart, the ocean itself stained a muddy brown. The only people happy are the tourists, wading through a world they neither understand nor care to. This is a place where people come to die, where they rest themselves in moldy homes, dreaming waterlogged dreams and wishing desperately to be free. Nothing is being built but docks and restaurants, more industry to pull whatever spare change visitors bring with them from their pockets. 
 
 Plastic tables and frozen food are heaped upon me in every restaurant, shipped in from where the waters are n't poison and the fish do n't have three eyes. I long for that. The simple freedom of clean air clean water and happy fish jumping in the waves. 
 
 But this place has a doom set upon it. A curse. 
 
 And I fear I may never leave.
