Twenty-Two
So this is it. The storm hits and you are a hundred kay from shore. There is nothing between this rage and you but a thin wooden hull and a hundred square feet of sail. Toss and run and hold the sheets - cleats are tricks to hold but won’t release fast enough; trust them and you will pull the mast to tipping point or have the boom swinging loose and trying to kill you.
This is elemental war, wind and sea, and you can’t win - all you can do is survive. Fear is not something you can conquer; this is bigger than that bravado. Swallow your fear, embrace it, use it, let it sharpen your senses to razor points. The test is to judge the moment to loosen the sheet, between the gust hitting your back and the sail, and how much to slacken and how much to pull. To keep going as the salt and the rain beat you and the sea tries to swallow you whole, to let the fear fill you and to embrace it.
This is like fucking on the cosmic scale, fucking with nothing safe and everything taking over. The best fuck of your life times ten thousand more. Fucking that will kill you if you come, and you are riding right on the edge of orgasm. Close your eyes and you are, literally, dead. And this thing will kill you if it wants, and you can't reason with it. You can be afraid and curl up and hide, or you can embrace the fear and be part of the storm and it takes you over and you are never the same again.
This is terror beyond thought; succumb to it and you die, but embrace it and there is elation beyond understanding. Fear in the storm is the pain in fucking, the pain that subsumes into pleasure, the switch from one sensation to the other. Fear in the storm takes you beyond itself, if you have the courage, to a greater fear, one that no longer cares if you live or not, but that still will not let you die. Will not let you die, not to save you but because ending this feeling is more than you can bear. The storm is not sex, the sea does not make love; you are fucked. You have no choice in this, but it isn’t rape. Struggle and die, fight and die, surrender and die. Or embrace and be more than you could ever be. Fear becomes ego becomes immortality becomes this moment in time.
The noise is like the greatest howling, the wildest passionate scream, beating on your eardrums, beating into your heart, your soul. In this moment you know that “blue” and “grey” and “green” and every word humanity has ever found to describe them will never hope to tell what you see before you, because no word can describe the colour that bleeds into sound that resonates with taste. Rage and this is rage beyond description, rage without anger, rage without malice, rage that will drown and rip and suffocate without caring why, rage that grows in enormity to make you feel small. You are nothing - know it in your soul. Surrender to it, because there is nothing else you can do.
If you fear, if you scream, if you fight, it’s simple: you will die. The sea will swallow you whole and not even notice. The world no longer belongs to you; there is no up, no down, the horizon is not to be trusted and the sky is just the sea in mirror and loves you no less. This all you can do - trust that whatever the end, in this moment, you are more than alive.