The Happening

Does the ocean know I am here? This morning a wave arrived beneath the boat and lifted me. Another took over before the first had finished. Then another. Then another. Like a relay race with no finish line.

The horizon remained exactly where I left it yesterday. Or where it left me. The strange thing about living at sea is that the scale eventually begins to leak into you. At first you admire it. Then you become accustomed to it. Then one day you realize it has quietly rearranged your soul while you were sleeping. How will I ever sit in a box again? How did we convince ourselves that straight lines were normal? Nothing in nature appears interested in them. Water curves. Clouds curve. Trees curve. Coastlines curve. Thoughts curve. Desire certainly curves. Even time refuses to travel in a straight line. It folds backward. Leaps ahead. Repeats itself. Forgets itself. Drifts. Yet we continue building squares and living inside them.

The birds arrived last night, confused by our mast spot light. The sun is here, they thought. Poor creatures. I know the feeling. How many artificial suns have I mistaken for the real thing? Money. Achievement. Recognition. The perfect sentence. The perfect relationship. The perfect version of myself waiting somewhere just ahead. A bright object in the distance. A lighthouse built by longing. The birds eventually figured it out. They left disappointed. I remained.

The notebook is open beside me. Patient. Promiscuous. A willing accomplice. I keep trying to seduce it with intelligent thoughts. It keeps asking for honesty. I want the perfect word. The smart word. The word that sends people reaching for a dictionary. Bullshit. The sea seems completely unimpressed by vocabulary. The moon has never used a semicolon. A fish has never read philosophy. The waves possess no theory of themselves. Yet they continue performing their duties with remarkable competence. There is another intelligence at play here. An older one.

Relational identity. Everything out here is relationship: wind negotiating with water, water negotiating with gravity, clouds negotiating altitude, birds negotiating invisible highways, fish negotiating currents, a thought negotiating its way into language, me negotiating with a notebook. I keep looking for things. Instead I find processes. I keep looking for nouns. Instead I find verbs. A wave is not a thing. It is something happening. A storm is something happening. A marriage is something happening. A childhood is something happening. A nation is something happening. A life is something happening. A self is something happening too. This possibility follows me around. Not aggressively. Patiently. Like a cat. I wake each morning and discover myself again. What have we got today? A philosopher? A coward? A chef? A fool? A sea cucumber with opinions? The line disappears beneath the surface and I reel up whatever happens to be attached. The universe seems remarkably unconcerned with consistency. The ocean appears equally unconcerned. She continues passing my boat from wave to wave as though handing along a serving tray. Careful not to spill the humans inside.

Ownership has started feeling strange. My boat. My thoughts. My future. My daughter. The language itself feels suspicious. The thoughts belonged to a thousand conversations before arriving here. The language belonged to countless mouths before passing through mine. The stars manufactured the calcium in my daughter’s bones. The ocean is already carrying her future somewhere beyond the horizon. What exactly am I claiming ownership of? The pronouns seem ambitious. A lot of life appears to be borrowing. Borrowed atoms. Borrowed stories. Borrowed names. Borrowed time. Even this body feels less like property and more like a library book. Important. Valuable. Worth caring for. But clearly not mine to keep.

A few nights ago I watched moonlight scatter across black water. Thousands of fragments. The reflection broke apart with every wave and reassembled itself immediately. No committee. No strategic plan. The moon remained untouched.

Sometimes I suspect I am not a thing at all. Just a meeting. A temporary agreement between countless forces. A relationship mistaken for an object. A verb that accidentally became a noun. Held together by coffee, memory, desire, moonlight, diesel fuel, old stories, bacteria, gravity, and unreasonable optimism. A republic of borrowed parts. A coalition government. A floating argument. A ripple examining ripples. Trying to determine where one ends and the next begins.