This is the only way to say goodbye. The pull of the swell dragging me across the seas. This is the only way to leave.
I had gone into the forest alone, to dig up my heart, buried long ago in the depths of this place. It had taken four days. Fingernails blackened with soil. Skin bloody against rocks and tugging at roots. Until my hands finally meet soft and pulpy flesh.
It felt heavy as I carried it out of the forest. I could feel its resistance. Its pull back to the earth. “This is the only way to leave” I whispered. Though I knew it could not understand me. “This is the only way” I said again, to myself, to my hands, bloody and tired.
I hung my heart at the top of the mast. So that I could see it when I looked up at the stars. Looked up at the wind vein. Looked up for direction. As though it might guide me. Though I knew it would not. Only a romantic would believe in this. I knew the truth, if given the chance it would drive us back into those cliffs. Break this ship against the ragged edges of this island. It would hurl itself onto unforgiving rocks, for a chance to return. To go home.
I watched it now, bound there with ropes, dripping and covered in the remains of soil. I had hoped the salty spray of the sea would wash it clean. But instead the moisture made mud out of dirt. Its raw flesh smeared dark with the remnants of this place. I knew then the depths of its refusal. Its unwillingness to let me leave.
“This is the only way to say goodbye.” I whispered as my hands uncurled ropes from cleats and hauled them in. Let the ocean take us now. And for a moment I did not look at the land. I watched only my hands working, watched the sail unfurl, raise up into the wind. Watched the fabric take shape, a triangle of white against the dark blue night. For a moment I did not look back.
There is something about the tension between taking control of the boat and relinquishing power to the wind and the sea. Between leading myself and being taken there. Into that space. Between holding on and letting go.
I watched the island disappear. The once familiar mass of it fading away, a blur of green on the horizon, until it was swallowed by the sea.
We became smaller and smaller too, my heart and I and this boat. Became nothing but a tiny dot in an expanse of pulsing ocean. Humbled by my own insignificance I peered into the darkness of the water as if searching for something. Unable to ignore the knowledge that this ocean could take my life, if it wanted to. I listen to the wind rattling the stays. Its high pitched whistle. Heard the creaks and moans of the boat. The splash and thud of waves beating against its belly. Felt it toss my insides this way and that. Sensed the hunger of the sea.
To be totally without land is to be in between all things. Where you cannot go back but there is no new start. Days are swallowed by the movement of the swell, rocking me back and forth. In time my body adapted to the rhythm. I gazed out to the horizon, watching the rise and fall of the sun, the moon, the stars. I let the boat drift in the expanse. Where there was space to say goodbye. To leave one place behind before seeing the edges of another.
At night, lit only by the moon, I would watch my heart, tied tight to the mast. Watch it sway with the movement, against a backdrop of stars. I would feel its pull, its yearning to turn around. It looked like a small and helpless thing. I had to look away then. Turn my face down towards the sea. Where my eyes met a second sky, a reflection of stars. Luminescent sparks that poured from the boat’s edges. We moved gently then, through the night, leaving a trail of phosphorescence.
In the daylight, with the swell behind us and the wind on the beam, we made steady progress. I stood at the stern of the boat and watched the horizon shift up and down. Watched as the waves drew up behind us as though they might swallow us whole. Felt the boat relent each time, and at the last moment carry us over and onwards.
When the squalls came, they came quickly. Dark clouds with streaks of rain appearing on the horizon. In such moments, all you can do is prepare for what is to come. As the wind whipped up I crawled forward to the mast, keeping low as the boat convulsed. Heaved hard on ropes, reefing the sail, with hands numbed by the sting of cold rain. Hold tight, I called out to my heart as it battered against the mast. As though my heart might understand. As though it might know how to weather storms. Hold tight, I whispered to myself, it will pass. And it did.
When land first appeared on the horizon it was almost undetectable. I felt it before I saw it. Something in the way the ocean seemed to shift in size. The way my heart seemed a little larger. The way the boat made its way forward with a different kind of determination. I knew then that we were going somewhere.
When the boat finally butted itself up against the soft edges of land, I looked at my heart for signs that it might feel defeated. But there, with the sunlight gleaming against its moist edges, it looked oddly vibrant. I climbed the mast and brought it down, feeling the way it pulsated in my hands, a steady beat.
When I set my feet on the land, I felt them sink into warm sand. My bare toes against the dampness. My legs wobbly with the stillness of it. I took another step and then another. Let myself adjust to a place that was at once familiar and strange.
My heart was heavy as I trudged onto the shore. Though its heaviness no longer felt like a pulling. It was more a firmness, a kind of grounding. I felt its flesh pumping in time with my breath. Noticed the smudges of dirt against the red muscle. It had arrived here still carrying the marks of the places I had once left it buried. It could not be wiped clean. Yet, in that moment, I began to feel a fondness for those darkened smears of what once was. An admiration of the way dirt can cling on like that, across oceans.
I walked to the shade of the trees that surrounded the bay. I let their shadows cool my skin. And placed my heart down there in the dirt. Felt relief as I let the ground take its weight. I sat beside it. Close enough to still feel its beat. We are here, I said quietly. And though I did not know exactly where here was or what we were doing there, I knew that it was something to have arrived. And so we sat there, the two of us, having left everything behind and sailed across seas. We are here, I almost heard my heart say, or perhaps it was the sound of the wind rustling the trees above. We are here.
