Since the story is about how, no matter how much you love someone or how much you give up, sometimes the other person will never love you back.

Wow, I never fully realized what a huge part that was of that story I was trying to write all that time ago, and where so much of its water-based imagery had come from. It's a topic that was on my mind a lot back then... and still is, for some reasons which are the same, and some not.