Ingesting

You, for whatever reason, suddenly looked less than the horizon to me.

On a normal night, the lack of jagged, saw-toothed pine roping across my eye’s limit was jarring. For months, I instead saw a depressing horizon as a flat line––a charcoal blue, an endless territory, a subject matter that did not interest me in the least. It was a horizon that swallowed the sun unilaterally, equidistantly, identically every late evening. And that collection of dying orange would leave me all the same, every time, every day, every repeating instance that I was not quite ready for it to leave me.

That was what I blame the open sea for––its ingestion of my dear sun.

And it was, at that time, when I also placed blame on you as well.

I dropped your wrapped body into the nearby waters. That small, gentle weight drew bubbles in when your corpse sucked the surface in. You did not float. It was not as theatrical as I might have drunkenly thought nights or months before. You merely floated aimlessly away twenty or so feet like a crumpled dinghy or a log, and then you went easily away.

There was some sort of tightness in my lower stomach. It was as though I had eaten something rotten from land, but I, on that day, had not felt the reassurance of land in over five months. And you gave me a headache somehow, and you made me want another cigarette––the first in fifteen years.

I stayed looking to the part of the surface that I thought had swallowed you down, but its waters were not as calm as those evenings once were, and I lost track of where it might have been. What little part of the sea you entered, like the breaking of a great atmosphere, roots breaking through black soil, a splinter in skin.

I wish I could have seen your whole fall through the depths––the shallows, the deeper waters, the deepening blues, the darkening navies, the coming blacks, the total blacks, the lanternfish, the undiscovered beings slithering beneath, the impacted sand at the bottom. I wish I could have been there with you, falling, interlaced fingers that turned cold with the temperature and wrinkled with pressure. Looking to your floating hair, all the way down until light left us. Feeling the small gnawing from creatures curious enough to try us out as we pass.

As we slip away.

No words to share, no completed thoughts, only watching one another.

My romanticism, however, was not the case. Eels did not rope your limbs. Krill did not swarm your mass like black clouds. You were not devoured.

It was nothing special––neither of us were.

For the evening after you left the ship and my pushing hands, I thought again and again over the aforementioned specifics. I sobbed like a child that I once had been. By the late evening, I knew they were only as what I call them: romantics.

You were gone.

There was soon no expression on my weakened, wrinkled, sun-ruined face, my lone and dying complexion.

I had a fever the subsequent day.

It was (according only to me) a low one. I had used half of the remaining tarps to wrap your tender, beautiful body with, and the surviving tarps held only a pit of rainwater that I lapped up like a dog. My line caught no fish––something that would, in the end, of course kill me, but I find myself growing happier each day that I do not have to flay their stabbing scales to taste their inner bitterness. By the subsequent morning, I only carried a slight headache with me. I stepped to the bow to take in the sunrise and its blooming colors like a hydrangea. They were dull. You were not there.

In the evening, I ate blue lobster caught from that barbed hook you once fashioned. It tasted like ink. I pretended to be happy with it, attempting to fool only myself, and failing.

At night, I drank the rest of the water on the tarps, wringing what drips I could from my wiry beard, trying to lick it all. If I had pills, I would dry swallow them all.

The next morning was somehow calm, and I took advantage of it. I did not believe in a Higher Power when you were around and I still do not––your absence and my utter mourning did not change that––but, that morning, I was granted some happiness. It was happiness that I probably did not deserve. Whoever granted those small, gentle, fast-moving moments to me, I am still grateful toward.

By that evening, I had mostly forgotten about it.

On the third day without rain, I drank four handfuls of seawater through trembling hands, sunburned palms, brittle fingers. Its only advantage was its cool temperature as it ran through me. I slept like a drunk baby, drunk from the sea––drunk from what little it gave me, and from everything that it had removed from me.

Another man on my stranded vessel caught a sea turtle––the kind with the ribbed, shimmering backs. The man’s name was simply Gorge. And Gorge had quickly removed the barbed hook from it, mutilating the poor creature’s face, and I, drunkenly, lurched forward and stuck him in the temple, the gut, the neck, the sternum––he fell against the boat’s side, and I attempted to push him overboard like all of the rest of the forsaken crew, but another by the name of Bill ripped me off Gorge by my shoulders, and I found myself on my back taking strikes by three others. My jaw dislocated. I wailed. Gorge was freed for the moment, allowing the sea turtle to fall to our fair vessel’s deck and flounder for some time in its spillings––in all that ran from its wounds––and I was battered further until I was unconscious.

When I later awoke, I vomited up nothing, remembering exactly how little of the sea I had drank, and promised to only drink three handfuls if no night rain would come.

And it did not come.

I woke in my flaking skin, my reddening tone––surely I had cancer of some type––to a blurred view of something that was not correct. It was a blemish on the horizon, a disgrace to everything I had come to know, a myth.

I sat up, rubbing what I could of my eyes.

A boat. With a sail. A decent bow, a dense hull, no color anywhere on it. It shimmered from the distance and I convinced myself that I had drank more of the seawater.

What I assumed was ten minutes later, the foreign vessel was still there. There were no landmarks to gauge how far it had traveled. I began to yell for it. It must have been half a mile. I yelled until I no longer could, and my eyes fell together, and I was soon asleep in the sun once more.

At night, I felt the rain. There was heat lightning high behind cloud cover, but it was not enough light to see the boat’s silhouette. I continued searching for it.

My father had once told me of stranded soldiers from the war drinking too much of their beautiful, surrounding salted seas and diving off to swim down for the freshwater fountain beneath the surface. And I––even with saltwater in my stomach––knew that it would never be the case, but it would allow me a slightly closer distance to you, and I thought about it.