Michael Seidlinger: The Fun We've Had

She could never picture it in her mind despite saying that she could. A desert island? It’s rhetorical. Fictional. There isn’t a lot of space on earth; every corner and crevice is populated with life. If it’s deserted it might be death. Danger ahead. But that’s the way they liked it. Especially now, she felt it, everything from the emotional surfaces to the depths of childhood, leaving her for good. She succumbed to numbness. She felt nothing.

She wanted nothing.

She heard him. She always heard him, especially now. How obnoxious his voice seemed as he wore that smile while the rest of his face told a different story. Let’s go!

To that illuminated patch of water.

The sunshine duped him dozens of times. All she could do was sigh. The sigh never escaped her lips. Those lips began to stick, as if shut for good.

Her character flaw wasn’t that she denied herself what she felt. She fed on her emotions, listening to every single nudge and twitch, even if it ended tragically. Her character flaw, like there was ever only one per person, had more to do with an ever-present pessimism. It might have been good, what they had, but she second-guessed everything.

Here and now, she second-guessed the sea around her. Distantly her thoughts mimicked the time she made her way across the country. She might as well have been by herself because she pushed away the two friends that occupied the same journey. She doubted the cities they visited, claimed the caverns they found to be duplicates, fraudulent copies of the real thing.

Everything seemed smaller and disappointing.

She had that tendency to expect the great from the mundane, the gold from blemished copper.

The sea behind those old, tired brown eyes could be cut in half. She saw only what she wanted, and half the time it was the silhouette of a young girl, joyously optimistic to the point of mania, about a journey she could not remember ever taking.

This, the journey that takes all.

The journey across seas is nothing but blind faith until one recognizes that the sea has no end.

If she opened her mouth to speak, she might have told him, saved him from further effort; however, where they were, all effort had already been spent. The things they did now were mere residual effects of lives lived in rapid succession.

Everything around her muted, the stain after bloodletting.

No more feeling having felt all of it come to pass.

“I love you,” meant half as much after her breath had been taken away. The half that remained holds on by a string. The eyes shut themselves, already tired and bored.

Suppressed sigh. The denial is numbness, a temporary numbness, until she, too, gives in and recognizes the source, the owner of the body she borrowed.

“I should think not.”

The sun wouldn’t stay even if it could. It teased him with the wonder of one clear direction until it left only the final few traces of light outlining the gentle waves, the ripple in the calm warm sea. Those young, eager eyes held back tears but the clouds that cast the sun out of this scene had already planned to do all the crying. First droplets could be seen dotting the ocean’s surface.

Surface turned murky, upsetting the balance, screaming out different voices, all of which, sounding together, from his ears could only sound like an incoming storm.

Shivering, he wanted to warn her, wanted to declare what would soon become a futile trek into treacherous waters. Where words should have saved, they splintered away. What he wanted to say had little to do with what could be said.

Everything had to do with the rainstorm.

The wind, the thunder, the waves crashing against the side of the coffin, spoke for the one part of him that needed to speak.

And yet he still rowed. He fought back what he should have felt. He forced back everything that might show weakness.

He turned a blind eye to what he looked like.

He could nearly see through the young girlish features to the inside of the coffin. He looked past the blonde, shoulder-length hair and paid no attention to how effortless it was to tie the hair into two perfect ponytails.

Over his shoulder, he saw not what should have been an unfamiliar face but rather her in fear, her drowning in the rainstorm. Over his shoulder, he wanted to warn her of the water pooling ankle-deep.

The feverish rowing continued until the oar wanted nothing more. It couldn’t have survived the storm and neither could they if they hadn’t already succumbed to prior demise.

Swallowing whole mouthfuls of rainwater did very little to displace doubt. He opened his mouth, wheezing out voiceless shouts, gesturing at her to help keep the coffin afloat.

It was taking on too much water way too quickly.

The storm worsened before it got any better.

Downpour reflected his every dying wish to have saved her from this demise. If he had said it before his last breaths, he might have been able to apologize.

It felt like the perfect moment, seeing her there, slumped over; the heavy rains pulled her into that obese belly. Her shape seemed to lose all definition. In the darkness of the storm, she looked like a blotch that he couldn’t quite reach.

Every attempt to get closer ended with a wave pushing the side of the coffin, the storm pushing him back.

Falling to one side, broken oar held in his hands, he let the splintered wood go, watched the broken pieces float toward her.

The rain was only rain until it became the only reason to keep them apart.

Wordlessly he watched the water rise and the coffin lower.

He was never any closer to giving in as he was right now.

Soon, he thought, the coffin would sink. They would have to swim. Maybe, he worried that he wouldn’t know how to swim when the time came. Maybe he’d sink to the bottom.

Who would sink first?

Him or her?

The rain stopped before she could notice that it had rained at all. When she stood up, the water in the coffin drained. Where she sat back down, the fabric never really dried.

She yawned.

Heavy eyelids she could not keep from closing. There, where he had always stood with some degree of confidence, she saw only the bluish-grey of a sky tired and dull.

Ready for whatever came next.

Eyes closed.

Eyes once again open. A yawn she could feel rising from somewhere deep within this aged body.

Looming threat being that the effort to keep those eyelids open lost against the will to keep them closed.

Blame… but who could she really blame?

She stepped over the same boundaries as he did. She barreled over the dangerous marks, blotted out the extensive disclaimers; the reach for demise outweighed the ridicule for having risked it all for just a taste.

“I could have been anything.”

It was a whisper, always a whisper.

She might have been someone.

She could have been someone to die for.

Certainly she did not die alone. He was there the same way he was there now, even though she couldn’t see him, he was there. Heavy eyelids concealed the fact that he fell into the water. He choked but was saved; she drained the coffin just in time.

He crawled toward her and sat to her right.

Heavy eyelids and dearly felt neglect. He might have tried to hold onto her; she might have reciprocated, but that’s the stuff of different stories, affection saved for the books that detail relationships set in the present tense.

A dead relationship carries on like a haunting, repeating the best far less than repeating the worst of times.

Eyes open, she leaned forward, looking down at those tattered shoes, disproportionate body acting as the simplest indication of neglected health. Mirror that with the quickest glimpse of what he looked like.