Damned & God

My tired eye’s have seen enough.

Click the cello after you read below, Augie March most appropriate to the context of my yarn below.

Hamish

When The Boat Comes In.

Wine, oysters, your love.  Her.

Sunlight. A stiff breeze. Salt and laughter fill your smile; her smile.

Love!  Oh love!  Your love.  Your love, her love.  Love!  So profane; surreal; profound! 

You examine each perfect iris; each so blue as to shame, lapis lazuli perhaps? Blue enough to mimic the magnificent butterfly wing of ‘Morpho Didiyour’? Oh so blue! So blue as to abase the madman Van Gogh and his ‘Irises’? Her eyes’; her beautiful, beautiful eyes! Such eyes so difficult to describe, yet so magnificent to endure.

The wind begins to flex its fingers, punching sails as white as the white caps that surround you; her.  The wind, beating with fists unseen, so fiercely tangible to send palpable shudders through you; her.

She. Her. Your love is smiling with the gaiety of the youth that fills her.  The radiance of her joy, such a heady tonic to your soul.  

Her hair is now whipping around her perfect head like a golden mist. Your beloved tam o’shanter jumps from your own; the tartan bonnet leaping and plunging like a sea bird into the cold embrace of the briny blue that surrounds your little wooden craft. 

Lost in the moment, and in one another, you miss the beauty of the crags of this northern Scottish shore line. You no longer hear the calling of the gulls.  You fail to note the darkness of deepening water. Love, glorious love, will do that to a man; to a woman; to a courting couple.

♠

You talk of everything and nothing. Her glorious lilt and sing-song voice regales literature, and poets, and art; you, her.  Marriage enters the conversation like a thief in the night; quiet and subtle, velvet over the tongue; silver to the ear.

The rolling of the boat gently rocks you; her; ever so slightly closer together. A finger, slim, feminine grazes yours; work thickened and hard. 

Without first contacting your brain, your hand has a mind of its own, and gently holds her unrestraining own. Again, eye meets eye, and the subtle increase in the motion of the ocean brings you closer once more.  Her cheeks, your ears, redden; all the while both sets of eye’s in unison examine the slanted hull of the wee craft, unable to latch upon each other.

Timed to unexpected perfection, your, her, eye’s rise again, locking, loving.  You are thankful for this increased swell, pushing you with force and gravity towards her.

Noses touch, lips brush against each other.  Yours; hers.  And then you kiss.  You taste the salty lips of an angel as they meet your own.  Waves, increasing in unnoticed size and shape, cause your heavy strong arm’s to gently surround her slender young frame.  Her arm’s, without her knowledge, mirror your own in their movement.

Two now as one; you wonder at the salty warmth grazing the corner of your mouth.  A tear perhaps?  A sign of unabridged joy?  A seal to the first and last enduring pact that is love?  The love of her; you?  You; her?

Quickening of heart and breath you separate; blushing, smiling, alive for the first time in your; her, life.  Emotion and sensation roll into one, neither of you experienced in either, yet the bond holding you; her, fierce and correct.

It is this moment, the sea’s movement increasing further, again unseen by either of you, that you pull the tiny box from the sporran a‘top your heavy kilt.  You say the words you have practiced over, and over, and over.

From the crest of a now large wave, she, her, utters a single word, “yes”.  Tear’s tumble down her cheeks; across her smiling face; you hold her all the tighter, and whisper thanks into her perfect ear.  Spray and white caps forming a veil around her in your mind’s eye.  Purity, the colour of the white manes streaming from large and racing waves, a mirror of her own.

♠

A bump to the bow lifts you from your trance, sea water rains down over you; her. As one you look forward; eyes adhered to the place beneath the single, perfect, sail for’ard; and a rapidly rising and falling bow.  Sky and cloud, the shade of the deepest bruises stands mountainous before you, lighting the phosphorous capped horses manes of waves; brilliant and white and thrilling. All surreal compared to the sun that drenches your sturdy wee craft. 

Excitement fills you, her; your love.

♠

The crack of sail deafens you both; a southerly wind drives you on unchecked toward the now lightning filled wall of death before you.

Working tiller and sail, you and she no longer wear the smile of newly engaged young lovers on a day courting at sea. The first day of the rest of your lives, together.

Your mask hiding bone deep terror is equally reflected by her, your love.  Your fiancé’.  Your wife to be.

As one, you both are quickly drenched to the bone.  If she has seen fear in your eye she has neither shown nor mentioned it. 

The bonny wee boat you both fill has chosen not to respond to your touch. Water is now finding its way across the port gunwale, collecting at your, her, feet; reflecting the black sky above in some ghastly mirror better suited to midnight and the damned.

Rain beats you without mercy, without reason.  The mild swell has transformed into six metre walls of freezing, green blue destruction.  You, her, no longer see sky. Or land.  Or hope.

Tossed. Dashed about. Silenced by the roar of the Gods, you lash your love to the mast; yourself to the tiller.  There is little more to be done.  Other than pray.  Praying a prayer older than time, peculiar to those in peril on the sea.  Praying to which ever deity has the grace to listen.  The grace to acknowledge.  The grace to save.

Being lifted and tumbled down upon itself; ‘tis not the fault of your wee craft you decide as you are forced beneath the waves.

Water closes over.  Cold and pressure welcomes you to an inescapable embrace.  Light disappears above you, never to be seen again.  Profanity briefly enters the mind-set, fleeing with equal speed; things of a more pressing nature fill the void. ‘Her’, and her mortality being the first.

Cold. Unforgiving. Unforgivable. 

Forever.

You damn God.  He damns you back, forever into an eternal freezing embrace.

Damned forever more to the sea; where lost souls and lovers, and the Styx do meet.

♠

Fin