Love, In the Dark

It is a strange thing to drift for a long time in the certainty of your own death.

I’ve been on the deck before when a man was washed overboard in a storm, and to my sensibilities then it was a sharp and sudden cruelty, a stab of horror, and of loss, and then the bitter regret and sorrow and guilt that lingered on afterwards. To my mind he was lost in one instant, and after that instant it was the long and weary slog of grief for a life snatched away.

But now I am on the other side of it, and with a deep horror I have discovered that the terrible moment when one is plucked from the ship and cast into the void lasts only seconds; but if you are not immediately struck dumb by debris or fortunate enough to inhale the brine in that first instinctive gasp; if you have the cruel fate to be a strong swimmer, and cursed with an instinct to survive, to cling to life, then a new reality looms ahead of you. I realize now that they are already grieving for me; to them I died seven hours ago. But the terrible reality is that I drift on, growing more and more tired, painfully and achingly aware that I am going to die alone.

I can still see them, on the horizon. The storm that tore our ship to tatters and threw me into the abyss has finally passed. The waves are still rocky, but out towards the edge of the world, silhouetted against the red fire of the setting sun, I can still see them. That image alone, that small shape in this endless wasteland is the only thing I can fix my gaze on, and to watch it grow smaller and smaller has been the most heartbreaking sight in my short life. I am only a rigger, or was. I just turned sixteen two weeks ago. I hoped to be a quartermaster one day, like they told me my father was. All my dreams and aspirations, my friends, my family was on that little wooden island. It was my whole world; now it’s a minuscule dash on an infinite horizon.

I have the sense that when they drop over that edge, out of sight, it will be the end for me. They seem to me the final thread linking me to life. While I can see them, there remains that frail and agonizing hope that somehow the impossible will happen. Somehow the receding shape will stop, and then reverse, and begin to grow larger again. I know that it won’t, but that’s the terrible thing about hope. It holds on to the impossible for as long as it can. Life, it seems, is built of that hope. I can barely move my arms. The salt stings my eyes and scrapes at my throat. I can’t swim any longer, and yet every time the water threatens to close over my head, somewhere from the depths of myself, outside of my control, and now seemingly past my desiring, there comes the desperate fight for life. This body is built to hold on, to demand every last breath that can be claimed, to give death not a mere second more than is his due.

I have time to think about all that was precious in my life, things I didn’t even know I held with such reverence. Suddenly it’s the simple moments, the sun-soaked mornings of summer, when I was young and didn’t know yet how lowly my lot was. The face of the girl who sat across from me in the cathedral when they took us to mass. The birdlike quality in her little face, the warmth of her dark eyes. They all seem to me to be of infinite importance, holy and shining moments, the only things holding the clinging tendrils of darkness at bay. I don’t remember much from mass; I was too busy in the awareness of the girl across from me. But I remember a few piercing words, and the carved wooden image of the man who said them, and now they are echoing in my own mind, again and again, like a haunting melody, like a prayer.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The sky behind me is growing darker all the time. If I wasn’t chilled to the bone already I would say it was growing cold. But I don’t think I can get any colder. My eyes are locked onto the last thin strip of fire, of oranges and reds along the horizon, and in the center of it, the little speck that is leaving me behind forever. I watch as it slips from my view, down around the edge of the world, and my tether to this life snaps, and is gone.

It seems to me that all the light I ever saw, all the joy, all the hope for the future was just a mere match struck in the darkness. Bright, beautiful, deceptive, fleeting. Powerless against the relentless onslaught of the darkness. The void around me seems so much more real now than any of it. Light seems to me now to have been childish fantasy; This endless blackness, this is real. And just as the light at the edge of the horizon is dimming, and night is closing in, as above, so below, I come at last to the dread certainty that the match of my life has burned out. All the warmth and beauty I clung to was just an illusion, a temporary skirmish against the dark, for which the dark only had to wait a few moments before reclaiming as it’s own. It was dark at the beginning, and in the end, to darkness all is returned.

This is the end of hope.

My frozen limbs seem to respond to the fading of the light, to conclude their endless, involuntary churning. No longer tethered to the horizon, I cease and instead fall back, letting the water catch me and cradle me like an infant, supporting my weary bones. The nurse at the boy’s home always used to say that I was all skin and bones, and more bones than skin. I think about how very soon bones are all that will be left.

I expect to sink right away, but the combination of salt water and air still in my lungs holds me on the surface, and I lay helpless in the arms of the sea, and suddenly I become aware that the darkness above me isn’t darkness after all.

The stars are ablaze with a fierce brightness out of the indigo depths, and the wonder of it catches my breath. With my eyes fixed on the horizon I hadn’t seen them; now suddenly the spiraling tapestry of the heavens stretches out before me, and the beauty of it strikes my heart, and I wonder how I hadn’t noticed it before.

A strange calm steals over me. It seems like the dying of hope is the worst thing a person can suffer. But once it’s dead, it’s not so bad. I am powerless to save myself, and that certainty comes with a strange relief. And suddenly I feel free to see the beauty of the heavens with no other purpose than to just revel in their majesty. No longer bound by the human longing to try to capture loveliness, to pin it down and strain all the life out of it, or to somehow try to bend it to my will, or to measure myself against it, I am strangely free to observe it without having to have any claim over it. I am decreasing, and it is increasing, and I am suddenly just grateful to witness it, grateful that my little life is coming to a close, and yet the stars have deemed me worthy to be with me until the end.

A new idea takes a hold of my mind, steals into my heart. Something solid and sharp and clear, piercing to the core, like a wind from the North. Mere moments ago I grieved the death of hope, the match burned out, the darkness as the eternal, and the light the temporal.

But it seems to me now that I had it wrong, and that the temporary light needed to burn out so that I could finally see the real light, the higher one. It seems to me now that there is a light deep within the darkness, shining all the brighter because of it, and clouds or smoke may dim it temporarily, but never eternally. The stars are never truly gone, even when we can’t see them for a while.

It must be getting colder, because my arms are seizing up and I can’t even flutter them anymore. The aching muscles in my chest feel locked in place, and each breath is getting shallower, and with less and less air I feel more and more my weight pressing me down into the depths. I was shivering before, but now even that has ceased, and strangely I begin to feel warm. Creeping tendrils of heat stretching out through my limbs, like I’m sinking into a warm bath. The waves round my face feel like caressing fingers, and I’m overcome by tears; or I would be, if I had any left in me. They would be tears of joy, not sadness—I wept those ones much earlier, back when I thought I was ending.

Now I have a sense that the stars are alive, and not just with a vague and impersonal sentience, but the eyes of someone watching me, someone who has always been watching me, and I have the sense of really being alive for the first time. I feel deeply and profoundly seen, the kind of thing which in my life would have terrified me; to be searched to the depths while one still thinks they have any control over their life is a terrible thing. But in my death, with nothing left to lose and nothing left to hide, if feels like a great weight being removed, like the relief of a masquerade being laid aside. It feels like falling in love.

Love. That’s the thing I feel.

I have never been more alone; yet somehow I feel surrounded, embraced, loved for the very first time. All my life has been one of loneliness. I have no one to return to, I will be remembered by no one. But now it seems that the love that made the galaxies spin has always been with me, and that I’ve never really been alone, and that I’m not alone now. In my life I was worth nothing. But in my death, somehow, beneath the watching stars, I feel suddenly adored.

If anyone had told me dying was like this, that dying felt like coming to life anew, I would never have feared anything ever again.

I feel it calling out to me, feel like it’s reaching down from the infinite depths of the sky, and as I slip slowly beneath the waves, I stretch out my hand, the last thing I’m able to do with my final bit of strength. I am now completely enshrouded in the water that feels warm to me, feel like I’m wrapped and held in a loving embrace. Through the veil of the water above me I can still see the stars, reaching out, inviting me in, and my own hand outstretched above me, black against the white fire of the sky in a final gesture of acceptance.

Love bids me welcome; all I can do is assent.

My last thought as my eyes close and my lungs finally admit the saltwater is to wonder at it; that the love that burns and beckons in the stars above me is also here, in the black embrace of the ocean.

Love, with me in the dark.