by Isaac Albrighton
I was out to sea for a thousand days. I couldn’t tell beyond the periods of low seas and the days of rain and storms if time had anything to do with me. Maybe it was just one long day. The hairs of my beard became like seaweed, and I could feel the salt in the water drawing more fluid between my skin and fat until I expected everything to drip off my muscles and all the salt and heat from the sun to cure the meat on me. Without any audience for complaints, all my thoughts became conjecture, and I’d play with the idea of in what stage of crisis a person would be in these conditions. Unaware, I was pondering my own end. I did this for hours while my tissue took on more salt and water until a thought broke in. I couldn’t experience crisis. I was like the whole volume of the Atlantic Ocean. There was nothing that could happen to me. I’d lost the ability to consider my pain and dying as anything dramatic or upsetting, anything but movement of water or evaporation from the surface of the ocean, and there was no one to consider my suffering either. There was nothing to surrender to. There was no beyond to wonder about. I wasn’t on the hook for anyone’s grief. I wouldn’t arrive late to the emergency room and piss off a nurse and die. No one could resent the loss of saying goodbye. If I had a bad hair day at my funeral, no one could even slap my corpse. And then my body reached the beach in the Mediterranean. I was alive.
Survival was painful. I dried out. My hair became straight like a man again. The soothing thoughts of never seeing anyone anymore were lost to the truth that being around people again would be lonely.
And I no longer can tell what is ugly or if something is art. I visited all the stained-glass tours in Barcelona and the person had to tell me which were the beautiful windows. In fact, when we were in the bathroom, there was a window to clear the air, and I stared at it thinking that the sense of beauty had returned to me, but my guide said it was just ordinary panes with some marking to prevent people seeing inside. I have no sense of beauty of women either. If that is something in the body, maybe it was burned out of my skin while the water dragged me to shore. But I continue to know what fairness is. To be unaware that a woman is stunning releases me from the need of pursuing her, of regretting it whether beside her later or in bed alone wishing I was. To not see beauty seems like a fair trade for having to live after a shipwreck. And then I still have the ability to wake up. I can still feel freshness at sunlight. Nighttime is still powerful enough to repair me, and it occurs independent of my effort. No one has told me if I smile anymore or how it looks, but I sometimes feel like I am. That’s enough.