She vanished just as the year ended, cyclically, calculated, measured, triumphantly turning around and beginning (yet again) just one more year ahead.


Though the stern was clouded, confused and muddied, the wheel of the ship responded gladly to the graceful yet precisely calculated instructions placed upon it. The sky was dark and the air was coldly bitter but the crew atop recognized that as long as the captain was on board, this ship would end up exactly where it was intended to be.


Delicate yet majestic, the ship grudgingly echoed its commands; culling every single moment from the prior year in a vast and resounding culmination of an ongoing continuum of axial rotations, stacked chronologically upon themselves like some kind of daily factorial gargantuan. Untold numbers of beings, held together in a vast network of uncertainty; each one planning and inter-planning goals, ambitions and dreams as they curried constructs of thought, back and forth, onward, projected in time.


The ship itself was an outcome of these realities; effectively not actual yet simultaneously preserving the outcomes of every one of those beings in a stochastic assembly of minutia far beyond the perceivable grasp of virtually each and every person, animal and thing that inherited being in corporeal existence.


Some called it a ghost ship, others yet referred to it honouringly as the jewel of time. It's ballasts waned in fields of uncertainty, gently guarded against the depths of the void itself. Each buckle of implausibility maddeningly added to the already inescapably large improbabilities that reality itself was effectively constructed on the basis of; rocking, rolling and intertwining this conceivability to that logistical determinant, absorbing insufficiency from one moment and casting it afar with a delicate twist, hoping to land each line of fate in a pool of betterment and well-being.


The ship traveled high up in the realms of the unknown, it's vast embodiments of knowledge often too much for ordinary people to handle. Fate, uncertainty, probability, luck, desire, impetuousness, candor and snark all veering about on their own due courses yet somehow still managing to occupy nearly all the same spaces without ever unfitfully losing course and tangling into each other like some kind of scrawny alley yarns.


Up, up and atom, the atoms turned up, and the flighty transactions of matters from which the very fabrics of reality were spun cohesed together delicately under the guidance instructed upon the ship by its masters. Together, as if beckoned by some sort of unseen force, the crew assembled themselves into an uncanny waltz, tying the spinions and grappling with anions, wrestling themselves in fate against the onslaught of later as droves of loyal subjects pushed themselves forward along the carriage of eternity, delving into tomorrows and beyond.


Perhaps, for some, to ease the tension and weight but for others, merely to acknowledge as fact of the matter, the crew often muttered through breath the very nature of their loyalty and purpose:


She is my word, and her I will follow, o’er the sands of time,

It’s not what she’s spoken, but what she has told, gestured in rhythm and rhyme.

Her masts are all open, her sails are all billowed, her prow is the pride of the fleet,

Yet I love her openly, not like a boat, but a journey span millions of feet.

She is the one, I’ve sworn all my life too, leaving my living behind,

And as when she’s with me, I cannot imagine, another one I’d rather find.

I asked her once softly, if she did not know, of that ways that I’d heard her so speak,

Of the way that she fiddled, my mind about gladly, dancing along cheek to cheek.

Her debonair airs, her wafty smile, her charms that stole away night,

Like the heart I had fleeting, the grin on my face and the reasons that bore me to might.

Fighting along, with her by my side, and certain of thus every move,

Like the way that she held me, together in arms, in a feeling I could not disprove.

She was one woman, one word on my mind, and a little bit wayward at times,

But that’s all I had, in this mystery woven, and that’s why it’s spoken in rhymes.


And somehow as if in agreement or response, the togetherness of the ship would shudder and tremble as if on one hand to suggest that so much more as a single overextended breath would be the last straw that this vessel would handle, yet at the same time pulling through yet again under the realization that not even the complexities of existence itself would be enough to burden the vessel, it's crew and it's ever faithful captain even one half an iota of concern.


Just two more twists and again, the entire ship responded, lifting the mayhem itself right out of the vestiges of a darkened humanity, plunging the sadness and emptiness right back to where it came from forevermore lost in a void of self-recursive nothingness.


Breathing a small sigh of relief, exhausted yet content, the captain left the deck of her ship and slowly, shamelessly and decidedly returned once again to her quarters, preparing unarguably in contention and readiness to steer this vessel back onto course and ultimately to rest humanity, its foibles and insufficiencies in the hopes that the hopeful smiles and eager ambitions to would come to find the wonders of happiness and fulfillment that made them all whole.


Back towards the captain's quarters as the ship itself quivered and questioned in response, slowly churning the wheels of time as the delicate positions of the crew on board heaved the masts and sails and ropes; each crew member decidedly placed into a particular position of purpose and ultimately, guidance to the ship itself. As each decision was enacted, just one more little string came together below, one more hope and aspiration and dream churned into being from a conceivable plausibility of the earnest potential of even one more somehow being able to now come true.


Although her job was done for now, the gworbling hum of the ship's ungainly passage through isness was a stolid testament to the highest degree of probability that still yet again, as sure as time ticks onwards itself, the captain would be back and the ship would succumb to her superior control as the people would advance and the clock would not stop, but meanwhile her quarters beckoned; and then, just like that, she vanished just as the year had ended.