Had we but world enough, and time…
Sometimes, a poet will start off with such a fantastic line that the safest strategy would be to stop there and not try to live up to it. Better to end with a great line and hope that the reader will have the patience to stay the course.
Sometimes, even the title will do. I read somewhere that Orson Welles so loved the title of Paper Moon that he told Peter Bogdanovich, I think only half in jest, that he should just release the title and not bother making the picture.
I guess what I’m trying to avoid saying is that I never should’ve gotten involved with her after our fantastic first date. Assuming that two passengers thrown together into a lifeboat from a sinking cruise ship could be considered a date, that is.
I wonder now if it was simply our refusal to face the sheer terror of being lost at sea that got us to turn away from our fate and focus on each other instead. And focus we did, with the easy familiarity that only desperate strangers can share. All those Titanic jokes came easily enough, but I normally don’t discuss posing for paintings in the buff when I first meet someone, do you?
Anyway, by the time we got around to being terrified, a passing fishing boat rescued us. After we had given our adrenaline its due (I tell you, sobbing uncontrollably is really underrated by the male half of our species), we found ourselves in an island guest house, with two days to kill before the weather got good enough for a seaplane ride back to the mainland. Surprisingly, there was no awkwardness, although I didn’t really dwell on it at that point. We even joked about it being our second date.
It was a lovely conversation really. We spoke about everything we were interested in – stuff we read, things we found weird…
Everything, that is, except our own lives. I guess we still felt like we were on a sort of time-out from reality, as though life owed it to us in punitive damages after what we had been through.
In hindsight, we should’ve given reality its due. Or at least the part of reality that involved such minutiae as the wedding rings on our respective fingers.
But for two days and nights, most of which we spent in her room, we banished should from our vocabulary. It turned out to be easier than we had imagined – once we moved past talking, we found ourselves unable to really talk to each other again. It was like we had run out of things to say, even though there were things to be said.
When we reached terra firma and headed back to our lives-in-waiting, we didn’t even say goodbye.
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