Settling

This one would be awful, though no one seriously believed him. These people whittled their lives away counting neighbors’ missteps, not watching the sea or weather. In as much as they remained consistently small-minded, they could not be blamed. 

From the unbroken lines of the glassy bay and the eerily long breaths between sounds of anything at all, it was clear to him that an ugliness was preparing to unleash. His beloved pier and the rickety iron bench he presently warmed would in all likelihood be swallowed whole by angry forces this time tomorrow and pulled out to sea past the drop. The drop only took away. It was a force for subtraction.

Carole had been pissy, again, this morning. She argued that he was not the weather man, nor was he the repair man or a business man. For that matter, what kind of man was he actually? It was the way one speaks when bitterness has settled into the cracks of dead hopes. They had never spoken this way when they first married, when her eyes were a piercing cobalt. He used to imagine then that it was possible to see even her siren red lipstick. She let go of makeup the summer she learned they were barren. In time even her blues melted into grays and now the whole woman, the entire relationship, was all just a palette of dust. 

To the color-blind sea captain, talk of greens and reds perpetually wounded him. He did not understand the nobility others spoke of, only his immutable desire to race back to the one color he truly knew. Blue, he had rightly surmised as a small boy, was the only color of the spectrum he truly could see. When it came to the water, he found great comfort in seeing the undercarriage of his life’s work in each of its hues.

His bench and pier (and they were his in a sense, no one ever competed for the space) were the last vestiges of a life on the ocean. Each homecoming proved a return to the angst and futility of the trivial. The relief when setting out for honest battles against the wind had often caused him to debate returning at all. What was once the limbo between voyages was now the ache between memory and fortune-telling. 

He had decided last week not to tell Carole. In their frustrated and childless marriage the only honest dialogue was what went unsaid. Instead, he paid the attached invoice for the lab results, set up a post office box two towns over, then told the doctor and lab he’d moved. The key to the box was hidden under old wads of Kleenex in the hole of his coat pocket. He could feel it now, contented to remember Carole had stopped snooping through his pockets decades ago. 

At the bottom of every sailor’s fight is the plea not to drown. All other hopes are built on that prayer. There is nothing in that rosary about long life or painful treatments. There is no clause for funerals or expensive coffins. Yet somehow, at his age, the choice of where and when had become a hollow victory. She did not need to know what he was doing. She would likely reason that what little they had left was easier to live on alone; she would cry for the past and not for him. It was better this way because it was an act of mercy in two parts. 

The knots were second nature and the bench was easy enough to maneuver with the bolts rusted through. The whole damned pier was falling apart around him anyway. The storm would make quick work of it tomorrow. No one would miss the bench. 

When they settled to the bottom and he held still he could see his beloved blue all around him. The majesty of the moment surprised him a bit - he had not anticipated what technicolor felt like. A moment complete unto itself. I have finally lived, he thought. I am finally home. And for once, Hugh Nielson saw everything as it was. 

Then, like it always had, gray took over.