The Fisherman.

The Fisherman.

Poets always write about the fisherman as if they know him, he thought. But how do you really know someone. Is it from pulling apart their skin, knowing what colour their scalp is, knowing what they had for breakfast. Or is it enough to know what I do with my hands, the way the smell of the ocean never will fully leave my skin, now that I’ve been here too long. Do they know my evenings, sitting with the nets, darning, fixing them as lovingly as a mother tends to her children’s socks and petticoats and elbow patches.

How much do they really know about me. Do they know that all this, all that I do is for her. Delmare. Redemption.

The wooden table was rougher then. Time had yet to smooth it down. I sat across from her, and stared. What else could I do. She was so clean compared to everything around her and for that moment I felt like the filthiest thing on the planet. Why did she want to come here, I wanted to ask her, but all I managed to say was something about her hands. God, her hands were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. They were the only thing getting in the way of letting myself love her completely. How can you love something so perfect when all you see of yourself is flaws.

If I loved her completely, like she wanted me to, like I did, I would have taken her to be mine. I would have never spent a day without her and at night, I would take her in my arms and smell the ocean in her hair, softer and more feminine from her than it ever did from me. In the mornings she would wake with the first light and pull the sheets off me. Some mornings she would smile to herself and leave the room silently, padding on the wooden floors that would get smoother the more days she spent with me. Everything became smoother when she was around. Other mornings, she would jump onto the bed, as if this day’s sun was stronger than most and gave her more energy, and she would pull and grab at any part of me that she could get. Her white hands would know which parts of me were the ticklish parts, and dive for them.

In the evenings, we would sit side by side, tending to the nets like they were our children, hands becoming green with the scent of age and salt.

But that did not happen. I could not let myself love her. Like a child who only knows about broken things, I didn’t know how to hold her. I knew only where my hands wanted to go, where I wanted to feel her skin against mine, but I was too afraid to trust myself, I feared the strength in my hands too much. Delmare. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Dark as the ocean when the moon has gone to sing her songs at the sun. I became a storm around her, my body holding the raging seas that fill gutters and drown streets. My blood filled the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Indian, stretching my fingers over the snow plains of her back, and I sat beside her with hands trembling as I did not touch her. In my mind, we crossed deserts and oceans while I crossed my heart and swore I would not break her.

To me, she was a child, washed up in the rushes: sent from someone else and not mine to keep. I would watch her over the stove, too shy to say a word as she moved from sink to pot, stirring, tasting, her blue floral dress brushing against her bare ankles and reminding me of how small her hands and feet were. A man imprisoned in his own skin, I was nothing. I become no one, a non-entity, a ghost of the person I was meant to be, a shadow of the man her father had agreed to marry this girl-woman to.

Time like this does not last long. Delmare. Swept away like the tides. No matter how vast the ocean inside me was, none of it could hold her because these hands were too afraid to touch and to fail. One night, when the night was dark and her eyes darker, she removed herself from my life. I could not say “stop” or “stay”, I could not say anything, for fear that I would break what I had already broken. So I sit alone, the fish and myself, two oceans parted only by skin, and the tables and floors that are smoother by time and no longer by her.