Esmeralda.  Emerald.  That’s the boat.  42 feet long, green.  Teak decks, two masts, a ketch.  I’m on it now in the haze of cartagena’s port.  the lights from highrises and container cranes give everything a slow glow.  The water is nearly still.  The measured hand claps of midnight-stained wavelets against the hull. 

Now daylight.   Open sea.  I know I won’t sleep this night.  Too much to feel.  Restless.  I’m at the bow, watching the shallow curve of the horizon tilt and tilt again.  I am the axis.  The fulcrum, the centerpoint.  Everything revolves, spins, tilts around and through me.  Now on the roof, on my back, lost in the metronomic rolling of the boat.  Now on the guarddrail near the cockpit, my hands wrapped around the cable stays, balanced on a thin strip of wood, the sea churning out behind and beneath.  I lean in counter rhythm to the swaying  mast, and I can almost stay still, then, in a world that’s anything but.  Surfing this emerald.  Or maybe I’m right here, lying in the back staring at the wrinkled surface of the water, at the subtle changes of its color as we move into deeper water; turquoise, green, blue, indigo.

And the nights. The tiny fingernail of moon rocking up there, its full round self barely visible, hidden  by earth-shadow.  And later, when she hisses into the deep, stars appear…all of the stars in the entire universe, every one of those timid crystal shinings that always flee from the artificial lights of cities, they’re present now, shattering the night where I lie.  I observe the finger of mast.  It,  inspired by the rolling sea,  draws mad arcs and figures amongst the constellations, mapping out it’s own delerious visions.

And the waves.  Muscular things.  And quick.  appearing out of darkness, one after another, indifferent, potent, lifting me to the sky, releasing me in wet sighs.  A numberless army marching.  Dying on invisible shores.  Their dumb and (until now) mute anger spent.  A shout of spray and mist.  Sudden, white deaths.  These waves seem alive to me. Immense animals.  it always surprises (and saddens) me to remember reality.  They are just waves of energy passing through inert water…nothing more.  (but is that any less miraculous, really?)

The boat, cutting the sea, leaves scars of foam that spark green.  Tiny, bioluminescent (what a word!)  plankton.  Microscopic echoes of the stars.

My favorite place is the bowsprit.  Seven feet of sitka spruce.  It always points to the future.  I spend most of my days, and nights, there.  Nothing impedes my view ahead, nothing but water below.  And when esmeralda bows, greeting yet another wave, my legs immerse for a second or two in the tepid water, and they tingle then.

And the best of the best?  When suddenly, as if manifested from water itself (and maybe it is so), appear dolphins, polished bullets…four, ten, up to twentyfour, playing in the bow wave.  They leap in unison, frenetically (yet with aching grace) crossing and darting amongst one another. 

What a tragedy to be human…such a clumsy, torpid creature.  We are anchored by gravity to the land, we move in two dimensions.  But dolphins.  No.  They fly. 

This close to the water I can hear their clicking sonar conversations, their humid breathing when they break the molecule-thick barrier between our worlds. 

Eventually they grow bored, or become distracted.  They disappear, almost instantly, absorbed back into their medium.  And I am left alone.  Again. 

And my chest constricts.  A strange sensation…I am all at once sad, hopeful, lonely, and thankful.  

A mixture of emotions unique, perhaps, to the open sea.