Sine and Moon (Jonti)

Creative Response by Philippe Perez

The wooden wreck trundled its way through the calm sea, tangled with mist. In the east, he could see the hint of land, but all other directions yielded blindness. It didn’t perplex him. It was simply telling him that this was indeed the route to take. Nothing excited him more than seeing those jagged edges atop the smooth sheet of ocean.

For now, however, he found himself bobbing up and down forever, eating what he could find along the way: fish; well-kept bread; discarded bottles of whisky found on shores he had staggered on before. All he could remember was a distant memory of a quiet home, decorated in ornaments not fit for an explorer of his experience. In his mind’s eye, the entrance lead to a large stuffed dog encased in a glass box. On the right, paintings that would make more sense hung upside down.

The memory swelled his brain. A scattering of ideas floated about up there. He had to catch them somehow, but the ability to do that was gone a long time ago. It was to tiresome, and the urge to fall asleep was greater than doing anything else.

There is no understanding found in wondering about so many things in the past when in the present is so barren. Thinking too much was painful for him. The memories were there in his head and it looked like he had to pry them out, stuck in a stiff wedge between the skull and skin.

All that happened was the calm bobbing of his ship. Up, down, up, down. Sometimes the boat tilted if a large swell came by. Those were the moments he waited for. They’d wake him up from his irritatingly sombre slumber. Irritating because he had to be alert to when he saw land, sombre because it was the only time he felt sane. To this seafarer, insane was sane, and vice versa. The blue world surrounding him became confusing enough that he began to think rationally about his life.

When the moment passed all that seemed to be left was some kind of sea-gremlin, fermenting in a faraway place within the ocean.

So many things were the norm in this dreamy enclosed world of his. He had no friends, and no outside feed of information. It was another world out there which turned into some kind of outlandish endless fright. It was all normal. He had abandoned himself simply for fate.