A Buoy and a Girl

They were lovers. It had sounded so romantic, alone overnight on his sailboat. Anchored for the night, all was cozy in the cabin, replete with a wide bunk of silk sheets.

He was a generous lover, but he wasn't working alone: the subtle rocking and list made for rhythmic sways and lurches that were magical.

That was before the sudden storm.

Sometimes even seasoned sailors are taken by surprise. Sometimes anchor chains snap. Sometimes two people are left hanging on a buoy in choppy waters.

At night.

Now, the rocking and list made for rhythmic sways and lurches that were not magical, but lethal.

It was a small buoy, and each of them held on desperately. Hand-over-hand—his hands over hers, hers over his—panic meant there was neither patience nor room for two of one’s hands to secure attachment.

If there had been just one of them—just her, she realized—she could drape over the top of it and rest.

Rest.

She needed rest. This was too hard, too exhausting. And much too crowded. It was two people trying to save themselves with a one-girl buoy. She felt guilt for an instant in thinking like this. After all, he had been her lover. The one? Who knew?

Any life-saving effective grasp proved elusive, their hands in a hand-stacking game where there could only be one winner. Was he a winner?

Was he the one? she wondered again. Again, who knew?

She would never know, because he lost his grasp after a particularly hostile wave flipped them—buoy and all—landing it back upright, bobbing, but without him.

She couldn't see anything in the dark, but she suspected where his pleading, receding hand might be. She could splash at it, perhaps aimlessly, for purchase, but that would mean holding onto the buoy with just one hand—a tentative struggle at best. And a waste of a whole lifetime's opportunity.

Her conscience made her consider it, but her instinct for survival had her consider it for too long a time to be opportune.

Existential struggles between conscience and instinct take time. Instinct makes snap judgments based on stress and fear of a consortium of conspiring dangers; conscience makes determinations more slowly. Instinct requires adrenaline; conscience requires guilt to buoy the sense of right and wrong.

That was a decade, a husband, and two children ago: after the tragedy, new shores meant new horizons and a new life. She saved herself—for another and for others. Yet, to this day, she often has a private, secret, and darkly sinking feeling, well below the surface where a storm still rages in her.