The Stranger in the Lifeboat

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Sea
My Dear Annabelle.
One final time, I beg your forgiveness. It’s been months since I wrote you
anything. I am still at sea, but no longer at war with it. I may live. I may die.
It doesn’t matter. A shroud has been lifted. I can say all I need to say now.
I’d be quite a sight to you, my love. There is much less of me. My arms are
scrawny. My thighs are thin chops. Some of my teeth are loose. The clothes I
used to wear are just shreds of fabric, chewed away by the pervasive salt. The
only thing there is more of is my beard, which is growing unfettered toward
my collarbone.
I don’t know how far across the Atlantic I have traveled. One night I saw a
large boat on the horizon. I fired a flare. Nothing. Weeks later, I spotted a
cargo ship, so close I could make out the colors on her hull. Another flare.
Nothing.
I have accepted that rescue will be impossible. I am too small. Too
insignificant. I am a man in a raft, and if I am to survive, the currents hold my
fate. The oceans of the world are all connected, Annabelle, so perhaps I am
meant to pass from one to another in a ceaseless looping of the planet. Or
maybe, in the end, Mother Sea will take me, as a mother bear takes her weak
and sickly cub. Put me out of my misery. Perhaps that would be best.
Whatever awaits, that’s what will be. The sick and elderly sometimes say,
“Let me go. I am ready to meet the Lord.” But what need do I have for such
surrender? I have met the Lord already.
Looking back on these pages, I see I stopped writing after little Alice spoke
for the first time.
I remember only darkness after that. I must have blacked out. The shock of
losing Lambert and Geri, the effort of swimming after weeks of inactivity—