=====================================
[Listen to the music, but please ignore the video, it was the only version of L'arrivee by Ehma on YT...]
======================================

***

''I hadn't meant to kill that woman at the beach.

From what I am able to remember, she seemed nice.
Middle aged, friendly, out for a walk with her dog-like creature - she kept calling it 'Tobbe' - on a foggy morning.

She must have spotted me, lying there among the rubble in all my overgrown, rotting glory. I must have looked like a corpse - which, incidentally, is probably not too far from what I am - and still, she had hurried over to check on me, had noticed me moving and had not hesitated, but grabbed me to pull me further up the shore, away from the icy waters of the sea.

She must have noted that I myself was just as cold, that my hair was longer than it had any right to be, tangled, matted, and clotted with seaweed as it was. Must have seen my overgrown razor-sharp nails, my deathly pale and bloodless skin, and the tatters, that were once my clothing, the fabric rotten, like it had spent decades in the ocean.

I must have looked like the age-old corpse of a drowned man come back to life and washed up on the shore.

And who knows, maybe that's what I am.

At the time I had only vaguely been aware of my surroundings. There had been no thought. Just instinct.

Despite what I must have looked like, the woman had come to help me.

And I suppose, she did, just not in the way she envisioned.

After I was done, I took her clothes and dumped what little remained of her into the sea.

It took me days before I even properly remembered the incident.''

***