It's not something that we often stop to consider. The inanimate. The non-living. The left-overs of a people that sometimes seem to have less humanity than something that isn't even human.
The old hull lay there, in the mud and sand, on the edge of memory and dream. It was a cruel fate, stuck there within sight of a past that had been so filled with life. It remembered. Perhaps not like you and I, but it remembered. The memory lived on in the wood that composed the hull. The memory of the waves crashing against it on stormy nights, of barnacles clinging to it in dock, of rough but loving hands nailing new boards and slogging pitch into cracks for waterproofing.
The memory lived on in the remains of the cracked and splintered mast base. The memory of the gales, of the breezes, of the gulls and the pelicans, of sails unfurling and tacking.
The memory lived on in the rotting remains of the decking. The memory of feet pounding in alarm or strolling in calm, of the resting of sailors in the sunlight, of the bodies of lovers in the moonlight.
Yes, the memory lived on and even though the torture of being so close to that memory was hard to bear, laying there mere feet from the waters' edge, most of the time the reflection was sweet and full of fondness, if emotions must be attached to such a concept.
Yes, until the last plank rotted away, and the last rivet scavanged, it remembered. |
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