🌊 SURF 'N TURF 🏝️
-THE BORACAY ISLAND LIFE-
The rabbits are always there first.
They live in the soft place of Lennie’s mind, where the grass never browns and no one yells his name in anger. They are white and gray and gentle, and they do not flinch when his hands reach out. George tells him about them again and again, polishing the dream until it shines. A little house. A few acres. Alfalfa. Freedom. In the telling, the world becomes kind.
But the real world is hard as sun-baked earth.
George and Lennie move through it like mismatched shadows, one sharp with worry, the other heavy with hope. They drift from ranch to ranch, carrying their dream like a fragile bundle wrapped in stories. George talks because silence terrifies him. Lennie listens because listening is the only way he knows how to belong.
On the ranch, men live close together and remain endlessly alone. Candy clings to what’s left of his usefulness. Crooks guards his isolation like a wound that never scabs over. Curley’s wife floats through the bunkhouse like a ghost, starved for attention, unnamed, unseen, aching to be known as something more than a mistake. Everyone is reaching for something just out of grasp.
Lennie reaches too hard.
He does not understand the thin line between tenderness and destruction. Soft things undo him. Mice. Puppies. Dreams. His strength is a storm he cannot feel building, and when it breaks, the world pays the price. George knows this. He has always known. Love, for him, has meant vigilance, sacrifice, staying awake so Lennie can sleep safely inside the dream.
When the final mistake happens, the ranch holds its breath.
The men move with purpose now, voices sharp, hands tight around guns and judgments. Mercy has no place here. Only endings. George walks with them, but his steps lag, every footfall a betrayal. He knows what waits at the river, where the water slips past indifferent to human sorrow.
Lennie sits by the bank, clutching the dream like a talisman. He has failed again. He knows that much. His voice trembles as he asks George to tell it one more time. Just once more. The story arrives like a lullaby, steady and familiar. The rabbits appear, brighter than ever, crowding the edges of his mind. For the first time, Lennie is calm.
George’s hand shakes.
In that moment, love becomes the cruelest thing of all. To protect Lennie from fear, from pain, from a world that will tear him apart, George must become the hand that ends everything. He chooses how the story stops. He chooses to shoulder the guilt so Lennie can keep the dream whole until the last second.
The river keeps moving.
After, the men will talk. They will not understand. How could they? They have never loved something that could not survive in this world. George will stand among them, emptied out, the dream finally gone. No rabbits. No little house. Only the echo of his own voice telling a story that no longer has a listener.
The tragedy is not just that Lennie dies.
It is that in a world built to crush the vulnerable, mercy must wear the face of violence. It is that dreams can be beautiful and still be impossible. It is that love, when stretched too far, breaks the one who carries it.
The river flows on, carrying the dream away, and the land remains vast and uncaring, as it always was.
"Pure signal, no noise"
Credits Goes to the respective
Author ✍️/ Photographer📸
🐇 🕳️
