We Are Blue

BY: MAGGIE MAURO

On the night our boat sinks, we are blue.  

The boat was my dad’s. An old aluminum work boat, weathered from twenty years on the sea and an additional ten sitting unused in his garage. You and I, we took it out too far in the ocean, and we knew it. The boat was frail. Small. But we would have contested anyone who claimed we weren’t invincible. Now, there is no one coming to save us. The boat’s systems failed before we could send out for help.  

We sit in the inflatable life raft, our bodies pressed together, pilfering one another’s warmth. Winter twists the air around us into a cold, dead thing. The only light spills from your waterproof flashlight, and it’s enough to cast your features in stark relief, shadow your eyelashes against your cheeks. You are blue.  

We are going to die. Neither of us has the courtesy to say it aloud.  

I reach for your hand, shaking so violently I am shocked my bones don’t dislodge from their sockets. Your skin must be glacial beneath my touch, but there is no blood in my fingers. I barely register the weight of your palm in mine.  

“I’ve always loved you,” you say. “I should have said it sooner. It’s been you all along.” 

The words nestle into my flesh like worm eggs. If given time, they would hatch and burrow into me, use my organs as their own. Make me sick trying to figure out what to do with them. I comb my grasp through yours, drenched with the knowledge that I don’t love you like you love me. Or I don’t know if I do. The rest of my life wouldn’t be enough to find out because my life is slipping from me like sand slips along hourglass curves.  

I don’t say anything, my voice frozen in my throat. You are so blue, hair ice-crusted to your scalp, veins cutting fault lines down your face. Eyes glassy in your skull. I can’t look at you. I don’t know how I love you, but I do know it’s enough to want to wash this sorrow from you. To smooth out the defeated curve of your shoulders. I grip your cheeks gently and put my mouth inches from yours, waiting for you to close the gap. You do. We interlock our profiles. Our lips push into one another, soft and purple. 

You taste like salt, and I’m sure I do too, partly from the ocean, partly from the tears spilling over our water lines. We are so cold it hurts. We keep going, desperate, because once this ends, we will be forced to confront ourselves. Or maybe not. Maybe we are close to death and beholden to nothing. It is so crushingly dark that I can pretend we are the only ones who exist, that the world begins and ends on either side of our raft, that everything will cease when we pull apart.  

The last thing I see before your flashlight dies is relief. Loosening the harsh lines carved into your forehead. Making your glass eyes tired. The only sound now is our breathing. Shallow. Even. We are both blue, but it doesn’t matter anymore.