He was a jellyfish being asked to float on land. Maybe life, for him, would always be hard.
I leave behind a wake of splintered wood and broken buildings and scared, know-nothing boys.
This was a new station with music so lovely, so frightening, so foreign, I hadn’t even known to search for its signal.
He’s not even interested in the treasure. The whole point is the adventure. At least, for his crew, that’s the point. The last true poets of the sea, he calls them. People for whom discovery – like, the concept of the journey – is the treasure itself.
Here’s what I should’ve said: I saw your face and the world was different.
The puzzle’s an incomplete circus, the pieces touching each other in all these ways, and there’s a hitch in our back from where you’ve hunched, but you’ve done it. You’ve put this thing together. Seams like veins pump blood through this cobbled-together catastrophe, this broken, beautiful mess.
By comparison, the Titanic sank in two hours, forty minutes. Pretty impressive, to have sunk to the bottom even faster than the twentieth century’s greatest shipwreck. Especially considering I was only sixteen. I didn’t even have a driver’s license, but I was an expert in the art of catastrophe.
Survival was its own quest: we needed to choose to survive over and over again. We had to wash up on shore, and we had to choose to keep washing up every single day. We had to let the survival accrue, pebble after pebble, building a beach from a million tiny moments until suddenly we stopped, looked around, and thought, on a Saturday in Maine, I’m glad we’re here.
It was the first time I’d said ‘survival’ aloud. Sam had survived. He’d survived, and I’d survived, too. Now we would survive together.
Him, her, a whale, you, what does it matter? You both saw the wreck, and you both swam up.
The warm invitation was just like my dad, too. He’d move a stack of papers from his extra chair and run lines with me while his computer pinged and his phone buzzed. He probably lost hours of sleep as a result. Just another kindness I’d taken for granted.
I had never had friends before, not like this.
We had a long way to go, but by then we’d be so knowledgeable, so wise, that between the two of us, we’d be able to name all the constellations.
A show in progress. A story unfolding. The theater goes dark for a scene change. The orchestra, though, continues to play. A riff on the show’s dominant melody fills the house – somber or suspenseful or sweepingly romantic – and the tone of the next scene starts there, with the music.
I imagined her springing from her father’s head, fully formed, like Athena.
Why did adventures have to happen away from home? Couldn’t the puzzle be an adventure, too?
In the fog, she kissed me once, very quickly, and it felt like courage.