Loving Someone Who Loves the Sea More
He always came back to shore, but never quite to me.
Marcus proposed to me with salt still drying in his hair, and I should have understood right then that the sea had reached him first. We were standing on the dock at Carraig Harbour, and behind his shoulder the water lay flat and silver, like something pretending to be asleep.
I said yes before he finished the sentence. He smelled of diesel and cold rain, and when he smiled, the weather inside me changed.
He kept the ring in a tobacco tin that had belonged to his grandfather, who had also been a fisherman, who had also, according to family legend, been a difficult man to keep in a house. I thought that was a charming story at the wedding. I think about it differently now.
Our marriage ran on tide tables. There was one taped to the fridge, one in his truck, one folded in his wallet next to a photo of me that he never seemed to look at because he did not need to. Six weeks out on the trawler, ten days home. His boots lived by the front door, and I noticed, in our third year, that they always sat facing out.
The ten days home were good. I want to be fair about that. He fixed the gutter without being asked. He cooked mussels in white wine and bad garlic bread and sang along to Fisherman's Blues on the kitchen radio, getting the words wrong on purpose to make me laugh. He held me at night like something he had caught and could not believe.
But he was there the way a lighthouse is there.
Bright, faithful, fixed... and always turned toward the water.
“Do you miss me out there?” I asked him once, in bed, in the dark.
“I don't let myself,” he said. He meant it as devotion. It took me years to hear it as the whole problem.
I did what women like me do at two in the morning while a husband sleeps like a man with no unfinished sentences. I read forums. Every post used the same phrase, loving someone emotionally unavailable, and not one of them mentioned boats. They talked about men who would not open up, men with walls, men with phones. Nobody had advice for a man who opened up completely and simply was not there, a man whose heart had a permanent forwarding address.
It would have been easier if it were another woman. Another woman argues, ages, texts at strange hours, makes mistakes. I could have fought a woman.
You cannot compete with something that never argues back. The sea never once raised its voice at him, and it never once promised him anything either, and he loved it for both.
Then, in our seventh year, the winch took two fingers off his left hand.
I got the call at work and drove to the hospital with the radio off, which I have never done before or since. The corridor outside his ward smelled of antiseptic and vending machine coffee, and when I finally saw him he was grey and grinning, saying, “Could've been the whole hand, love, could've been the arm,” as if he'd won something.
The doctor was a small, precise woman who did not soften things. No more deep water work. Not with that grip, not on that gear, not in those seas.
I am ashamed of what I felt in that corridor.
I felt like a wife hearing that her husband's mistress had died.
He came home. Really home, for the first time since the wedding.
And here is the part I did not expect, the part nobody warns you about: I had spent seven years wanting him ashore, and within four months... I would have carried him back to the boat on my own shoulders.
He painted the fence twice. He fixed things that were not broken until some of them were.
He stood at the kitchen window every morning with his tea going cold, watching the boats leave the harbour, and his face did the thing a dog's face does at a closed door. He became polite.
Polite, in a marriage, is a fire alarm.
“You're still not here,” I told him one night, over a dinner neither of us was eating.
“I'm sorry,” he said, and he said it the way a man apologizes for the tide. Sincerely, and with no intention in the world of stopping it.
That was when I started writing. Not to be a writer. Just because the house at night had too much silence in it and I needed somewhere to put it. I sat at the kitchen table with his grandfather's tobacco tin in front of me, empty now, the ring long since on my finger, and I filled a school notebook.
I tried to write about love and every draft came out sounding like the harbour at low tide, all mud and moored things. The loneliness poems were easier. They wrote themselves, the way water finds the crack in a hull.
On a Tuesday, I did something reckless. I typed up the least mud-coloured poem and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, under my maiden name, like a woman having an affair with her own voice. It did not win... It did not need to. Somewhere, a stranger had read the truth about my marriage before my mother had, and the world had not ended, and I slept nine hours for the first time in a decade.
The poem was about a moored boat. Of course it was. About how a boat tied up too long does not become furniture. It becomes a wreck in slow motion. The rope does not save it. The rope is what kills it.
I read it back one morning while Marcus stood at the window with his cold tea, and I understood that I had not written about him at all.
So I did the thing that everyone in Carraig still argues about. I found him the job myself. A smaller boat, coastal runs, three days out and two days back, gear he could work with seven fingers and a grudge. I put the paperwork on the table next to his mug and I said, “Go. Before I start hating the man I got instead of you.”
He cried. I had seen him cry once before, at his grandfather's funeral, and both times it looked like weather coming ashore.
People assume I released him as a gift to him. I did not.
I did it because I could not keep watching a moored boat rot, and because some part of me had finally accepted the terms I had actually married under, not the ones printed on the invitation. He is a man with two loves and no talent for choosing, and I am a woman who spent seven years asking the wrong question.
The question was never, does he love the sea more than me. The question was, can I love what is left when the sea takes its share.
Some days the answer is yes... That turns out to be enough days.
He went back out on a cold Friday in March. I stood on the dock in his old oilskin, and when the boat passed the breakwater he raised his ruined hand to me, and I waved back.
Then I did something new. I turned and walked toward the town before the boat disappeared, while it was still a boat and not yet a speck, and I did not look back once.
He always comes back to shore. I have stopped standing on it, waiting... The sea can keep his horizon.
I finally wanted mine.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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