my family is telling me it's time i make my peace with you. it's a peculiar idea, and not one i'm particularly open to. you've morphed, in my mind, into something like a giant squid, roiling through angry green water. luckily, you've never managed to become something so cliche as a white whale. you would be very hard to let go. you might be the last thing i see before i die.
i was talking to ahab last night, talking so long that my ear was sore from the phone, and i could hardly wake up this morning- he didn't seem to think i needed to make peace with you. but even though i love him, i don't think him sane. his advice only feeds my longing to be right. when we talk, our conversations are dogged with wasted years that taste like salt. maybe i ought to make my peace with you.
certainly, it would be better for all of us, but the trouble is, i've finally hit on a plan for revenge that might actually work (you, my sea monster, have inspired more ridiculous plans than any other sea monster, I promise). because you're just a sea monster, just as naive as can be, this plan will work.
also, it will finally give me an excuse to run away to sea, and while i'm there, thinking of you tied in swollen knots on the beach back home, it will give me an opportunity to taste real salt that isn't running off my eyes. and i could write ahab a letter and tell him that i'd finished my work and if he would finish his, we could sail the world together; and he'd phone me that night and we'd talk for a few hours and come to the conclusion that he'd never think quite hard enough about me, and i'd be unhappy in the light of his nautical cigars, and that we really shouldn't be together. i'd spend hours wondering if i'd said all that only because he was saying it, or if i really meant it. then i'd have to come back to you, trapped and breathless on the beach and tell you that you'd ruined things between me and the man i loved, and i'd sit down with my back against your slow-drying undersea skin and look out to sea.
you'd be my only comfort then.
maritime revenge story
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incredibly exotic. you're brazen creativity never ceases to amaze me janie!
ReplyDeleteSometimes it gets lonely in the depths. It's not that it's not teeming with life. There's all sorts of weird things here, some of it terrifying--fish with huge pale eyes and glowing lamps that make them gleam in that sickly way. But none of it is you. You, in that beautiful sleek boat--ready to cut away from everything, to sail from island to island. You, with skin fairer than any pearl, your hair tangled like the brackish plants that manage to survive down here, your eyes as wild and untamed as the sea.
ReplyDeleteI want you to know you're beautiful. I want you to know that you are going to kill me and even then, you'll be beautiful. It will be my honor, my deepest honor, to be the trophy on your wall. Because you're beautiful. Don't you dare forget that.
many thanks rob, but
ReplyDeletei like to believe i
already knew that
by nature of a fairie
named Love; he frequents
every listening heart
but revels in stealth.
if you're quiet when
the lights are on in
the bathroom. turn them
off and look in the
mirror and if you
had ears to hear
you'd have seen it.
that is true
beauty.
a white feather lands
barely causing a ripple
in the toilet bowl.