meeting a stranger

I've always hated boats. They say that to make room for something you love you have to take responsibility for 3 extra things that you hate. And there is only one thing in my life right now that i truly love, my art.

Though i will say that the peace from watching the waves behind me as i sail out to the middle of not nowhere but nothingness, is enough to make me forget exactly what may happen in my most terrifying dreams. And it is here where we are able to see each other clearly enough to cut out the lies, the pain, and everything in between. Underneath all of the diverse, complex, heartbreaking drama that is inside my head while puffing on that last cigarette before i meet my destiny at the coordinates i've memorized like the middle of my bedroom floor, i still just fucking hate boats.

Sometimes before i resume business i like to anchor there on the floor of my trusty floating stead and stare into the stars and speak to my lonley quiet friends before dropping them off at their final resting place. It was more than serine on this one night as i listened to the waves crashing against only the almost stagnant water that lie beneath them as a mysterious aesthetic control barrier to lend to the idea of a wave being part of an entire being of liquid light that moves not only constantly but toward and against itself at all times. The irony of lying atop a giant organized, living metaphor for myself never failed to choke me to suffocation, sufficing to say that it was at this instant i had to rise to my dizzy sea shook feet and carry on with the night at hand.

As i steady my ankles, i catch in my peripheral vision a young tug boat to match mine, its owner throwing over the side wall of his horse a bag too large and unmistakably heavy. As im no stranger to a hallucination or two i immediately figure that this boatman may just be a vision of my very self in mirror image. And this assumption would have stayed with me if not for the fact that my supposed other self used the trash bags with yellow ties instead of red and as this was no mistake and i always use the bags with red ties without fail, to this effect i was in fact floored.

I sent out a nice wave to either wake myself up or encourage the other boater to reach out and not make this awkward yet somehow settling affair any further toward the vail of surrealism. This particular exchange was already much more than i could handle. As my fellow night rider shifted forward to my bow i felt my breath thickening and choking me. This was real, and real fast, and as he got closer it dawned on me that the man himself was unequivocally beautiful. (scratch that further comment, it was now that the situation was overtly more than i could handle. )

For the first time in history a stranger, a person, anyone at all for that matter was stepping over onto my trusty voyager. I reached out for a hand, and his was soft and so was my heart in an instant. And in the same instant my sea sickness rose and left my body like a divine experience. This moment would so explain why tinder never worked out for me. He asked me what i was doing so far out here and when our stories matched up there was a second where we both looked back at each other in awe of both the fact that we had each been so honest with perfect strangers but that we could laugh about it and feel comfortable about what we did for a living with anyone at all for the first time each.

My alarm went off and though we could've talked all night, it was time to move before the morning when the fisherman and workers were out. And though it did stop the good conversation which my mother said never to let fade or i would be alone forever, it was this motion of seudosabatoging responsibility that brought us to shore, and there i was in fact not alone but with an instant partner someone who could not betray me and vise versa unless we wanted to end everything we shared and loved. And it was simultaneously this motion that brought us back to my mid city apartment for late night drinks that never did make it to our nervous lips.

It took a while but eventually we got extraordinarily exhausted and retired to the very kitchen floor where i had formerly been harvesting paint for my newest work of magnificence for a cold, shared glass of water. He told me all about his work moving bodies for the wives of domestic violence in upper copeland about 20 miles west from my residence. He even laid out the system in which he executed each task from priming to targeting to wrapping the sorry old sack and included some of the awful stories that landed him the job in the first place starting with one of his mother's friends from her poker nights when he was staying in his old bedroom in between semesters at college. “Perks of going to a state school,” he joked. Where one night he was smoking out back when he heard the party interrupted by his mother bringing in one of her guests from the front porch whom rather than being boozed up and ready to trade chips for gift cards to the spa or the soup plantation tumbled in via a simple limp with bloodied face and arms she fell to the sofa with the guidance of “ma’s lead” and bawled for nearly an hour about how she had just escaped from her likely to be following behind husband, and the misadventures in between. To embarrassed and socially disturbed to enter the house while such things ensued he waited for nearly an hour and a half chain smoking cigarettes on the patio until unexpectedly instead of the problem just going away it spear headed right into his life when the victim wife came out back for a smoke herself and spotted the estranged young gentlemen and he instantly without thinking or hesitating apologized that he should have rushed to the scene like everyone else but does not quite know his place around the house now after he's been gone in the dorms for quite awhile. And after that there was simply no going back and her request just flowed out during the most embarrassing conversation of his life. And so started his lofty career as a high payed killer. And still as mine was a much shorter and surer story of the curiosity of as child that could never create a truly intact portrait of my own diluted memories and dreams with acrylic or oil paint, we appreciated each other then in a way that no one else ever would for either of us. And that planted something in each of our hearts that has grown and thrived and held together for what is now approximately 6 and a half years through marriage and even the so unforeseeable retirement. For this was the love story that would reach even us few who should have never found it. And it all started on a boat.

P.s. i still hate boats.

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