From the top of the hill, I watched him make his way through gray sheets of rain sweeping across the landscape. I heard a wet splash as his shiny red car plowed through the accumulated mud gathered in front of my sorry excuse of a driveway. There was a crunch of gravel, and his knuckles had barely touched the wooden planks when I flung the door open violently.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
He didn’t answer; instead he kicked off his boots into a familiar corner and ran out the back door. I followed, feet pounding, holding my breath as a pungent mix of salt and seaweed stung my nose. I found him in the light blue shed, where he stood holding his old fishing pole, crusty from years of use, yet with a new line already set, gleaming silver like the glint of sunlight off raindrops and fish scales.
He stood there for a moment, holding the pole delicately in hand, before turning to me. “We should get out there,” he said, and he spun on the spot and stepped outside, but this time I grabbed him and I didn’t let go.
“You can’t be doing this,” I said. “You’re going to miss it!”
Again, he didn’t respond.
“Please,” I said, louder and angrier this time. “You have your entire future ahead of you. Think of your family, think of all you’ve worked so hard for, all those sleepless nights. Now that you’ve achieved everything you’ve been dreaming of, you’d throw it all away?”
He just stood there, silently, under the gray drapes of the rain. The water dripped down his hair onto his wrinkled Oxford shirt, soaking his trousers through, tapping a small metallic rhythm on the tin floor. His face was bathed in the great grayness of it all. The waves kicked up the sea of gray into the air, mixing with rain, blurring the world from ground to sky, softening straight lines and hard edges. Tendrils of mist wrapped themselves around us like an octopus or maybe a blanket, cold and electric on my skin, and the muted sound of waves whispered in my ear like so many lost voices.
“I would miss this more than anything,” he said. Even his breath was gray mist, swirling in the air. “Do you still remember when you first gave me this fishing pole? All those years ago?”
This time it was I who pretended not to hear him. “Come,” I said quietly. “We should get you on your way.”
“I do,” he continued. “More than anything. I remember having this thirst, like a raw burn, constantly driving me like a wolf in need of water. Icy, numbing, water. I remember grabbing this pole, the roar of a propeller, and hooking myself into a feeling of lightness, lighter than the mist, floating through the waves with the wind in my face and spray on my hair, so strong it peeled back my eyelids and dug inside my ears, until the sea and the ground and the smoke and the noise melted away, faint ripples in the water, so small and so mute they were lost in the waves. I was flying, or maybe it was swimming, somewhere far, far away. I distinctly remember my first catch: silver with a hint of a green, mouth agape, shiny, and expressionless.”
He turned toward me, gripping the fishing pole so hard his knuckles turned white. I remembered now too. With this fishing pole, he was a conductor. With one wave and swing, he could command the ocean itself.
“The gray clouds that I had hated for so long lit up with the light of the rainbow.” He stepped closer. “You remember, don’t you, the double rainbow arching over our heads?”
I closed my eyes.
“I would give up everything for this,” he said. “This mixing of water and air, this line between earth and sea, between solid and liquid. I could take this fishing pole, walk up to the dock, and whirl away into nothingness, a pure and simple truth, forever. And no one would be able to stop me.”
He paused.
“Not even you.”
“But you know you can’t,” I said without hesitation. The rain thundered in my ears. “As much as you would like to drown it all out, you know it isn’t right. We have always known. You and I, all of us, are cursed to be here. To feel things.”
With slow, gentle hands I reached out and held the fishing pole. It seemed to pulse, slowly, in my palm. “Your future isn’t out there. It’s right here.” I gripped it tighter. “Please, I’m begging you, do not delude yourself into doing something you’ll regret.”
I looked into his eyes, and he seemed to let out a long sigh, strong enough to punch a hole in the mist. I felt something powerful die in the air, felt its corpse give weight to every water drop, felt the cold and damp return to grip my shivering body. And in that moment I wondered if I had done something terrible.
I closed my eyes. I yanked the fishing pole from his hand and placed it back on the wall, crusted with decorative sea shells.
“It’ll always be here when you get back,” I lied. “And so will I.”
He hugged me then, one last time, and I watched him gather his belongings, heard the car door slam shut, and the roar of engines and tires on asphalt. He disappeared into the distance, and even then I secretly hoped that he would return.