I am thinking about the woman in the boat
On the day that Alan and I were in Fort Myers Beach when Mikee was buried at sea, before he called his brother to watch Oskar who consequently died that day or the next....a loaded place to go back to....
we're on a boat with two of Alan's friends and he's crying and he can't straighten out. They are dying. They don't have long left. He just saw his best friend poured over the side of a boat.
There's this woman in a dinghy. She's cruising slow. A Busch can of beer in her hand. She has gotten far too much sun. Her hands are really, really big.
Alan's friends say the man she lived on a boat with had died ...and that is all she does. Putter around alone and not talking. Just waiting to die.
I just find myself staring at her slow movement past the mangroves like some how the whole thing had something to do with me.
And I think back on this memory and I'm the only one from that tableau who is alive. The only one that cruel day who remembers the wind in my hair and her slow sad funereal progress through those brackish waters.
I have almost 5 years of writing blocked on this site that I'm thinking making public again. I need to know what I was thinking that got me where I am, because I did have a master plan and I think I'm misremembering it, mistaking myself for that woman in the boat.
See...that's not my story.
we're on a boat with two of Alan's friends and he's crying and he can't straighten out. They are dying. They don't have long left. He just saw his best friend poured over the side of a boat.
There's this woman in a dinghy. She's cruising slow. A Busch can of beer in her hand. She has gotten far too much sun. Her hands are really, really big.
Alan's friends say the man she lived on a boat with had died ...and that is all she does. Putter around alone and not talking. Just waiting to die.
I just find myself staring at her slow movement past the mangroves like some how the whole thing had something to do with me.
And I think back on this memory and I'm the only one from that tableau who is alive. The only one that cruel day who remembers the wind in my hair and her slow sad funereal progress through those brackish waters.
I have almost 5 years of writing blocked on this site that I'm thinking making public again. I need to know what I was thinking that got me where I am, because I did have a master plan and I think I'm misremembering it, mistaking myself for that woman in the boat.
See...that's not my story.