This Endless Ocean
written by: Richard M. Ankers
@Richard_Ankers
I remember the future. The past is forgotten. Memory tells me this is incorrect, reversed, unnatural. Memory is wrong.
***
The spirits forgive me, I must tell all, have to, can’t stop myself. For the sake of those to come, not the departed, the cycle requires explaining. I would wish for an eloquent man to re-veal these truths, but I am what I am, imperfect and forgotten. There is no one else. There never was.
It begins when I close my eyes. The clouds trapped behind this shuttering skin race across my retinas, singes mysterious impressions into my being. Darkness and light slice each other apart in blurs of midnight and gold. Mountains fall. Rivers run dry. A desert burns to glass. The world dies in increments of ochre decay. I reopen them only when the scene slows to a saunter before then stopping altogether.
Blue abounds.
This used to be my favourite part, the wonder of not knowing. Now I do, my wonder has gone the way of humanity.
There is a faint line where once an atmosphere shone like a cerulean crease between the pitch-black water and the obsidian night. The stars above this fault line glitter like diamonds. The ones below ripple like their dreams. I suppose we’re all dreams caught in another’s eye, so it’s no surprise.
When I make the reverse trip, she is there. I open my eyes to a woman I know from the picture beside her to be my wife. How can I tell her I don’t know her name? How can I tell her she’s already dead?
She smiles through her sleep like everything will be alright. My own will soon disprove this. The curtains will not draw back to a world filled by a golden sun, one exploding with life and love and longing. Children will not laugh and play in a garden brimming with apple trees. Dreamers will no longer dream the next generation.
These thoughts don’t last long. They never do.
I am a leaf on a temporal ocean drifting from one point to the next without ever an in-between. I see the beginning and the end, the hope and the reality without ever appreciating the struggle to reach either. Life is a struggle, I think!
I am back in this world of contrasting depths, where the perfect water captures eternity like a poet. “A mirror to God,” I whisper, but the solar winds snatch my words away. The de-sire to watch the stars fall, to see it through to one final cataclysmic finale tugs at my mind. To know the unknowable, it is a potent elixir. Yet residual experience tells me this moment shall be as fleeting as a swooping swallow. So, I soak in all I can, hoping to remember enough to tell my love should ever we speak, then relent.
There comes a point whilst staring out at infinity when one realises there is nothing else. Life has passed and like an old tv show, you’re just watching the highlights. Still, you watch. And I do. I watch, and I wait, and I watch, and I wait in constant repetition. Until I don’t, and I breathe my first breath.
I’ve felt nothing like it. Of this, I am certain. I inhale the cosmos, filling my lungs with spiralling galaxies that whizz through my arteries. Entire universes pour through my heart, kick-starting the inanimate like God’s own defibrillator. Shooting stars collide in electron ex-plosions. Neurons fire. And I remember. And I recall. And I scream.
The endless ocean trembles at my madness like a vast, wobbling jelly. It fears the spectre I am. As do I.
The image changes.
I stand upon the water like a ragtag Jesus. I do not sink. The water will not take me. The ultramarine abyss is full now, the trenches gone. Liquidity is a veneer, and I am the blemish that won’t polish away. If I look down, only my reflection looks back. If I look up, the same. This can’t be right?
I shake my head to a vacuous rattle, try again. Eyes roam. A bewildered imagination roams further.
Wherever there is something, there is me. Wherever there is space, I fill it.
Something from a forgotten memory tells me I hate to see myself in one reflection, let alone applied to this infinite canvass. I close my eyes to a spark of something that might have been told, or dreamed, or lived.
There once was a man who’d had enough. He took more pills than he needed to ease the pain, dressed in his Sunday best and walked out into a lake. He submerged with a smile on his face and an echo on his heart. Later, the authorities found his hat floating on the surface. They may or may not have searched for his body.
I have no hat, nor pills, but I walk. How I walk!
It was a lie. The Earth is not round. There is no true horizon. At least, no longer. Our as-tronauts faked it all for some unknown purpose. The ancients knew better and those mariners who toppled over a ledge of water so vast as to thunder down forever. This place where eagles fear to soar is real. The end of the world. The end of entirety.
My eyes are open again, the reflections gone. Eternity has dimmed just for me. I have in-terrupted this stagnated nothingness like a fly buzzing near an elephant’s trunk. It swats and misses. I remain.
There are ripples everywhere. They precede me, run from me, open out like the wings I’ve never had, flee. They never return. I’m superfluous to the multiverse’s needs. It seeks to dilute me, strip my every atom, roll me away piece by tiny piece. But one cannot be totally ex-punged, can one? As I look around, I realise the futility to this thought.
It is strange? The further I stray from the place in which these eyes first opened, the more I recall. I remember the cat who sat on my knee as a child. How I stroked its sable-soft fur. How I tickled its ears as it purred. I remember the dirt clotting under my fingernails, as I sought to dig it out of its grave, the one my father had dug deep into our garden.
I wake, claw at the water as I sit on my haunches and cry and weep and wail. There is no cat. There is no grave. Is it even my memory?
It takes time to compose myself, but time is what I have.
But one point anchors this wayward soul. Just one junction in these infinite, spidering pathways.
My wife is called Eve. I am sure of this. She likes lavender candles and cars with air con-ditioning, white flowers, as long as they’re brilliant, and Japanese names. She hates tobacco and littering and people who sneer. She is definite in every way. Yet, something so simple as the colour of her eyes remains indefinite. I think they contained flecks of blue, not the deep blue boarding on black of this endless ocean, but the azure beauty of heaven seen on a clear sum-mer’s day.
Oh, what price an atmosphere upon my soul to shine. Hm! Who’d have thought it, a poet, after all.
I’ve had no requirement to contemplate what I wear, as I was never here or there long enough to worry. My endless back and forth between two designated points in history preclud-ed such worries. Now, however, things have changed.
My shoes are of polished black. My trousers are the same, though duller. I have a smart jacket with a silk lining covering a shirt of simple white. This is me. This is the man I was.
Another memory sparks.
He wears what I wear, although he lies on his back. His eyes are closed. His gaunt face bears more lines and crags than a massif, with deep ravines carved into his forehead. He is at peace. A woman stands to one side, holding a man’s hand whose back is to me. She weeps flecks of blue from eyes the same, not for herself, but for me. My father is dead. As is all histo-ry.
I do not know what kind of man he was, how he would dress if not dressed by me and my wife one final time, nor even what he ate for breakfast, just that he buried my cat deeper than deep and laughed every time I spilt ketchup.
This ocean before me, around me, everywhere, is no longer a dark blue, but red. A vast vision of coagulated crimson with galaxial scars and cosmic scabs; with planetary platelets and moons for corpuscles, that dreams of flowing again.
I cock my head like a robin once might’ve, or a puppy learning to sit. I scratch a chin that requires no scratching, twiddle fingers happier apart. Something gnaws at my soul, a ravenous need. Time cannot freeze as it has. And I realise this purposeless existence is purposeless no more. I am needed, and not just to look upon a dead father, or even a long-dead, endlessly sleeping wife, just because.
I remember the future. The past is forgotten. I have lived a reverse existence for this spe-cific purpose. Mine was not to unravel but to parcel up all neat and tidy. Mine was never to re-member and always to forget. At least, the definite past, if not the possible future.
It is said that all the power one needs resides in one finger. Bruce Lee could knock a man over with his finger. Da Vinci could paint one with the power of an atom bomb. A fingertip can poke a hole in the soil in which a plant might flourish. Two fingers, well… the possibilities are endless. Opposable thumbs have nothing to do with it.
I don’t risk one or even two, instead, pushing my splayed fingers, palms and all under the mirror-like surface like a floundering arachnid, disturbing several improbable civilisations and a wandering comet in the so doing. Here, I pause, think, imagine, pray, contemplate, liberate, and finally, stir.
***
I was and always have been the one. And though I might have dallied with life, sampled its delights and its failures, I was ever, and will ever remain, apart. Look upon all I have created and weep for me, for I shall remember only the next.
The End
- Anywhere but Nowhere - September 3, 2023
- Spotlight On Writers –Richard M. Ankers - August 19, 2023
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