Messages Addressed to Nobody

I still see her yacht on the horizon as the sun is setting. It’s a bit smaller now but, almost intentionally, I still see her marking the otherwise perfect union of sky and sea. It’s been years since she sailed away, and now we all gather at Michael’s house on the day she left to—maybe not mourn—but certainly remember her.

     “Do you think she’s happy?” A familiar tenor, Michael, speaks behind me as I turn to face him. He’s a young man in his late thirties, with glasses that framed brown eyes.

     “I’d like to imagine so. There’s no real way to find out though. Are you holding up alright?” I turn away from the yacht, noticing as I face the land a cluster of storm clouds beginning to move out towards the beach.

     “As well as I can. It’s hard to just...see where your sister is. All the time when you go to the backyard.” He sighs, looking a bit uncomfortable. “Oh, dude. Don’t throw your bottle in the ocean.”

     “I didn’t have a drink.” I respond, turning to see a bottle of blue glass nudge against the sand. I stoop down and pick it up, noticing a piece of folded paper inside. At certain angles, I made out her familiar handwriting. “Looks like Olive wrote something.”

     “What?” Michael snapped to attention, approaching me from behind and looking at the note. “Bring it inside, everyone will want to hear this.” I follow him, a fast walk turning into an eager jog as he throws open the back doors into the house. The collected group of family and friends turns to the sudden entrance. “Abram found something Olive wrote.”

     I nod, holding up the bottle. The general hum of gathering stopped in an instant. Immediately, all eyes are on me as I walk over to the kitchen and wrap the bottle in a towel before breaking it. Within the blue shards of glass, is a faded piece of paper with Olive’s writing, which I begin to read aloud with a shaking voice:

     “It has been three years since I set out on my seclusion. I thought I would live my final moments in the arms of the ocean but it’s taking quite a bit longer than I thought it would. I think the exact date the doctors gave me was a month after my diagnosis. But it always happens like this, right?”

     “It’s the people who accept their fate, that are ready to leave and will do so with dignity, that suddenly the body preserves itself. That now with good sea air, I’m pickling in the lap of luxury.”

     The room is silent. A heavy and choking silence. Rhea, Michael and Olive’s mother, cries softly in a corner. I set the letter down with a sigh.

     “So. I guess it was a form of hospice. For her.” I say to the dumbstruck crowd. “Do,” I turn to Michael, “Do you think there’s more?”

     “I’m sure.”

     “Right. I’ll go looking.” I grab my coat without hesitation and walk outside. It was already a pathetic twilight, meager light painting the sky a more modest shade of blue.

     “Abram!” Michael follows me outside, putting a hand on my shoulder, so I can stop. “It’s getting dark, and it looks like a storm is coming. We can wait till the morning.”

     “But what if what’s out there gets destroyed?” I retort. I feel a calling to the water that plagued men of an age of novels I’d laugh at.

     “I doubt it. And if they are, then they were simply meant to be.” Michael counters and crosses his arms. I look at the sea like a dog looks outside, but relent. As the doors shut a lightning bolt pierces the sea, a roll of thunder causing the more fragile things to shake as if affected by a passing train.

     The memorial kicks up again with the offer of Spades and cousin Cole’s brisket being pulled from the oven. It was Olive’s recipe but before she left she entrusted it to only him. As I cradle a tumbler filled with fine bourbon, no less for the Lucidas I suppose, Rhea sits next to me.

     “Hey.” A sigh and a supportive smile, “Holding up ok?”

     “I,” I stop, and I have to think for a moment. Am I? “I think I am. It was just odd how it all happened right?”

     “I...yeah. The diagnosis was so sudden and then the second she started to deteriorate she just left.” I sigh, and Rhea puts a hand on my back to support me.

     “It was hard for all of us. Honestly I’m sure she’s already quite dead out on that yet. It’s somehow more comforting than thinking she’s just suffering by herself out there. And, now, we have a little bit more of her we can hold.” Rhea stands, taking a deep breath and letting her shoulders relax with its exhale. “I think we have a raft you can use tomorrow to get out to the yacht.”

     “Thanks Rhea.”

     “Of course. You have access to the guest room, always.” She pauses. “You know I see you just as much of a son as my other children?”

     “I—thank you.” A knot forms in my throat and I shake it off, opting to go upstairs and get ready for bed. I hear rain and the sea as I change into sleeping, and dream of Venus at sea, without her shell, drowning in the waves that birthed her.

     Morning comes, and I wake up to Michael knocking on the door. I make some kind of groan of entrance, and he opens the door. “Feeling alright?”

     “Sort of.” I sit up, rubbing my head and the sleep out of my eyes. “What time is it?”

     “About noon. So...we got the raft ready for you.” He leans against the door, “It’s not in great shape but it should get you out on the water well enough. Want coffee before you go?”

     I nod and get up, quickly getting dressed before getting downstairs. At the living room, it appeared that only Rhea and Scott, the father of the family, were still at the beach house from the party last night. I get a mug—coincidentally one that Olive painted when her and I went to one of those kitschy pottery painting places—and fill it with black coffee before slamming it like a hot shot of medicine.

     “Oh, eugh, bad idea, bad idea.” I cough out, putting the mug on the table and shaking my head as a full cup of caffeine makes a rush line to my bloodstream. “Ok, boat?”

     “Well...boat is a strong word.” Rhea says, leading me out to the shore where a small raft was, tied a stake buried in the sand haphazardly.

     “Ah, seems...buoyant?”

     “Oh, for sure! Scott tested it early this morning and it seems fine, it’ll get you to the yacht no problem. Just be careful with it. Whatever happens, as long as you can get to the yacht you’ll be fine. It’s solar powered so it should have plenty of juice to get back home with it.”

     I nod along to Rhea, heading back inside to prepare. “What should I do if she’s there and alive?”

     Rhea pauses, looking quite uncomfortable at the thought, “Well. I guess you’d better have a conversation with her then. And then go back to honoring her wishes.” I nod, and head back inside.

     The raft is somewhat makeshift, but it holds together. I disembark at sunset, storm clouds forming ominously over the land and swiftly making their way out to sea diligently. I spare a look at Michael and he looks at me as if seeing a ghost. He is pale, and clearly more anxious than I’ve seen him. We nod, and I sail away into the water, painted gold by the setting sun.

     It takes an hour to be within a manageable distance of Olive’s yacht. Along the way I see a shimmer and pause my paddling. I see the glint of a bottle that’s sunken, and I wonder if it is worth pursuing it.

     I dive into the deep, swimming down as the rays give me stripes and patterns seen on animals and pull the bottle which was wedged under a rock. My lungs begin to be felt by my mind as the pressure of inhalation makes itself known. I quickly swim up, the bottle in hand, gasping for breath as I heave myself back onto the shoddy raft.

     I spend a moment to catch my breath before I open the bottle, shaking the water off my hands before carefully unfurling the paper. It was smaller than the other one, and written with the shakiest penmanship, the weakest pressure:

     “I finally feel it. It settles across my skin and visits me in my sleep. I have hurt for too long, and now I am ready to leave and begin again.” My heart sank as the smell of rain began to creep into my perception. I make no sound as I cry, my body just reacts to the pain, even though myself and all of Olive’s family already sort of assumed this.

     The hurt was of confirmation rather than of grief. Assuming you lost is the sensation of pain whereas the confirmation is the continuing throb that feels like rot. The ocean picks up, the raft being jostled and bullied by ever angrier waves. I snap out of my emotions and look around. The shore is likely too far for a raft like mine to return to safely. Olive’s yacht, though, might work.

     I throw myself into the water and as I look back, the raft is swallowed by a wave. The yacht is within reach and I begin to swim towards it, the current and choppiness of the seas making each stroke feel like pushing through a liquid weighted blanket.

     I see the bottom of the yacht and grab on, my hand finding the rung of a ladder built into the structure of the boat. The sea gave way and I found myself at the lowest point of Olive’s yacht that was above water. “Olive!” I climbed aboard, the waves rocking the boat like an amusement park ride as the storm picked up. “Olive!”

     It is hard to explain. The smell of tragedy. The silence where, obviously, someone wept for days and days. The feeling of hopelessness sunken in on the old floor. It is if the wind was her own wailing sobs. I run through the deck and at last I found her.

     She’s so cold. Her skin blue like the siren I always knew her to be. Curled up by the wheel of the yacht. “Do you want her back?” I shout into the storm. I offer to the waves, their Venus back. They only shush for a reply, but I could feel it in Olive’s final moments. To be so close to water. To finally be it.

     I return her to the ocean.

     I weep for a thousand things that could have been.

     I weep for a life I will never get to share with her.

     The ocean offers its silent sympathy, as it knows too, what it is like to lose someone. It shushes its waves to quiet my cries. The rain joins the comfort.