05.06.08 - 6:37 pm

well, theyre gone. the last of them have been rescued. there is a tender sadness that follows each good bye, a poignant awareness that youll never see them again, even though you spent so many days and weeks and months with them.

you were there when the baileys caught that sea turtle, and even tied one up to keep as a pet. and you were just as annoyed when a passing vessel ignored them time and time again. one hundred and seventeen days you spent with them. thats along time to watch someone disintegrate. painfully slow, all the while the deeply personal fibers of a marriage unraveling and rebuilding into a structure far stronger than could be imagined otherwise.

and then there was that time you were crammed together with the robertsons. torture. two kids, a teenage son, a married couple, and robin. big clumsy robin. i distinctly remember the brackish enemas. an experience ill always remember. thankfully it was only some thirty eight days.

and steven. steven and your dorados. borderline obsessed you became with those fish. i mean, i know theyre beautiful to look at and all, but i really didnt care for their constant badgering of my open sores. how much weight did you lose, forty pounds? i felt pretty good, thankfully, although on day seventy six i was just as ready to see land as you were. i wouldnt mind going back to the floating island of garbage though, what a fascinating ecosystem that must be.

so, at the end of each of our rescues, i say good bye to my new friends, and hope that i remember the instructions they taught me. simple but incredible feats of human endurance and ingenuity. feeling almost an attachment to them as i read their thoughts, their intensely vulnerable inner turmoils and near defeats. i think out of all of them, steven was my favorite. i think ill ask him out for a beer, i dont know what id ask after that. i already know everything. he told me already. but maybe just to sit next to someone, and try to perceive the soft hum of relentless human will. the instinctual flavor of survival that must gently tease the air around these people.

this is all glorifying what any of these people would simple denounce as them "just trying to live", but it offers my mundane life a window in which i may not welcome a similar event, but i wont fear it either. not so i can write about it and put the story in a dusty book somewhere; but so i can feel like a more complete human being. passing or failing a test of the most primitive means of survival.

either way, the idea of it all is quite exciting.