Unprecedented

They say I am cresting the wave now. Maybe I am. You can’t tell until you’ve crested, I suppose, until you are firmly, assuredly, plummeting down the other side. From there, it’s a rolling push to the beach and dry land, cocktails at sunset and all that.

I’m not there yet though. I feel the swell and the subsidence of a wave yet to fringe into a lip, to gather and arc beneath itself and release those thundering white horses to charge towards the shore. That’s the wave I want to crest. I can hear it, ahead, the shush and hiss of that stampede running itself dry and settling back into rest. I can hear it, and so I know it’s there, but I do not yet feel that gathering, I do not yet feel that surge.

~~~~

They said we were all in the same boat. That was bullshit for a start. They made out like we were an armada, a fleet of battle ready gunners, every sailor with a task, but it was more of a flotilla, really. A ramshackle flotilla. It didn’t take much to see that. I was luckier than some, I believed. I believed my ship was pretty sound, well provided, solid bones. Sure, some were in steel sided behemoths, cannons port and starboard, but some were in pleasure cruisers, row boats, dinghies even. Some had the sense to slip into the flat water behind the bigger vessels, though they quickly got left behind. The others, well, too many of them were gone in the first storm.

Now I wonder if they went quickly, or drifted like this, whether their boats were dragged down, taking on water faster than they could bail them out, or whether they were thrown onwards on the currents, in, out, in, out, in, out, until the sun and dehydration took them before they ever reached land.

When the second storm hit, we thought we knew better how to ride it out. Reef the mainsail, batten down the hatches, drop the sea anchor, hold fast and sit tight. But there are no guarantees, at sea. Worse things happen at sea, they say, and they’re rarely wrong. My boat? Couldn’t hold. The sky was black when we began to list. Not a star in sight. At first I barely noticed. We were used to being off balance, after all. But once the water started coming in, I found myself gasping, astonished at the bite of it.

She broke apart quickly, this boat, that had never been the same boat as everyone else’s. There were weak spots no one had noticed, flaws no one had paid too much mind, an exponential revelation of damage and disarray. I had legs enough to put out a mayday call and lower the remnants of the lifeboat before I was swept away. And now I am here, just me, adrift and clinging to this skeleton that is somehow still afloat. Our boats were never the same.

I am sightless now, there is light, there is dark, there is light again. But I can hear the rush and suck of the spent sea somewhere near, and I can feel the rise and the fall of this ragged vessel, and I know I am here, though I could not tell you where. My body is nothing but pain now, but I know that this will pass. Sometimes, I hear voices. It can do that to you, solitude. Desperation. Hope. After all, I put out a mayday. They say I am cresting the wave. They say they will stay with me. They tell me I’m a fighter. They call me by my name. They say my daughter loves me. And I can feel it now, the lift, the arcing hollow beneath, my boat riding high, the gathering towards the shore, and I wonder which shore, and I pray for sand and cocktails and watching my loved ones once more, and I am tilting, and tipping, and crashing into the white, tumbled and churned and then, then… Then there is stillness.

The hush, after so long at sea - and perhaps I chose the sea, where worse things happen, for its vastness, touching every corner of this world - is a balm. The stillness. The fading pain. My boat is gone, dashed against the seabed, unable to make it to shore, and I feel impossibly sad. “I’m sorry.” I hear. “I really thought…. Yesterday you looked…. I thought you were going to make it.” And I wonder if I ever did. I hear the rustle of plastic, and tears wetting the edges of the muffled voice. “Your daughter loves you.” And my name again. My name, and “Your daughter loves you”, and impossible sadness.

We were never in the same boat.