Tell my wife I am trolling Atlantis.
It is the habit among fishermen to keep two sets of records. There is the true catch, the lists of weights and market prices and bycatch and routes. And then there are the records that are tailored to match the laws of the seas, the ones that deny that anything rare, unusual, or of any particular value was ever caught. Should the ship be chased and searched by authorities, the true records can be flung overboard, their contents quickly destroyed, the truth obliterated by its source.
I am pouring over the various methods of accounting that I've kept on the subject of us. Edited in different ways, several different stories can be told, and I can no longer decide which volume, if any, holds the truth. I read passages from them as they fall open around me as my ship is torn apart and searched, a sad and frantic cut-up offered in answer to the authorities. It reveals a series of laws that I have broken, the equipment that I have allowed to fail or have always been unable to read, my mad boasting of my own powers, numbers and prices and lustful poetry marked in abrasions made by ropes on my hands and in your gills, a dozen compendiums in which I forget rational figures entirely and scrawl in small script the endless, countless beautiful things that I have drawn up from your depths, stopping only when I've run out of pages with which to detail them. The search goes on, and I offer torn pages that, individually, convey nothing. And I jettison none of my fictions in case my boat is seized and I must spend the last of my days on land, turning to the comfort of my accounts, attempting to remember the thrill of the pieces of you I could find in my nets, the taste of salt.
I am pouring over the various methods of accounting that I've kept on the subject of us. Edited in different ways, several different stories can be told, and I can no longer decide which volume, if any, holds the truth. I read passages from them as they fall open around me as my ship is torn apart and searched, a sad and frantic cut-up offered in answer to the authorities. It reveals a series of laws that I have broken, the equipment that I have allowed to fail or have always been unable to read, my mad boasting of my own powers, numbers and prices and lustful poetry marked in abrasions made by ropes on my hands and in your gills, a dozen compendiums in which I forget rational figures entirely and scrawl in small script the endless, countless beautiful things that I have drawn up from your depths, stopping only when I've run out of pages with which to detail them. The search goes on, and I offer torn pages that, individually, convey nothing. And I jettison none of my fictions in case my boat is seized and I must spend the last of my days on land, turning to the comfort of my accounts, attempting to remember the thrill of the pieces of you I could find in my nets, the taste of salt.