1) The Passage, day 10.

Day 10,

“I will leave a light on for you. Don’t get lost. Find your way back.”

Your last words. Distant. A dream already forgotten.

I promised you I would follow it, that damned light. And that’s how I broke my first promise.

I’m lost. I’ve always been lost.

But you’ve always known it. And you’ve always been there.

Unlike me.

The fog is like a smoky serpent. Suddenly it appears and envelops me in its deadly grip. Taking away my sight. Forcing me to drop anchor. Preventing me from continuing. Forcing me to abandon myself.

But it leaves me with one thing, the only thing that abounds in this boat: The wait.

The memories, the thoughts, the voices.

They flock, overlap, repeat and contradict themselves in this endless waiting.

So deafening, yet faded.

As if they belong to a remote past. As if they do not belong to me anymore.

Then, as if nothing ever happened, suddenly, the serpent dissolves. Leaving me to contemplate the greyness of the sky and the dark abyss of the sea with its incessant, sweet call.

And here’s how I lost two days.

Yesterday was a special day: After being, I admit it, very lazy, I rose from my bunk, and having heated the three-day old coffee in the moka, I checked that the nets were still intact, before throwing them back into the sea.

And between them I found a surprise.

A small sculpture of a rabbit, simply and elegantly carved in Norwegian spruce wood; erected on two legs with a scarf of wet red wool.

It reminded me so much of your origami and your sculptures.

In that precise moment, all of a sudden, the world became liquid.

The frost was intense and penetrating, but I did not care. Nothing ever really mattered to me.

Ancient emotions, buried, erased, erupted from inside of me and filled my heart with a lost heat again.

I stayed there, in the icy rain, for hours, on my knees.

Crying.

As I had never done before.

Holding that little spruce rabbit tight to my chest.

I spent the rest of the day watching him. Unable to do anything else.

I imagined a loving grandfather who, while waiting for his prey on a hunt, thinks of his little grandson and takes a branch of spruce, a little too big, and cuts it with a hunting knife, carving the shape of the rabbit. Then, when he returns home, he shows it to his wife and she decides to make a small red wool scarf from the same wool she had just used to make a scarf for their grandson.

I imagined the joy of the child when he received that bunny, and how he would always take it with him, sleeping with it, exploring the vast meadows in their red wool scarves, and playing on the impervious walls of the fjords. Until a gust of wind dropped the bunny into the ocean.

I imagined the child's despair, for the loss of his bunny, running with wet, swollen eyes into the arms of his grandfather, who hugs him warmly and begins to look for a big branch to make a new bunny while the grandmother serves a slice of rhubarb and strawberry cream pie, making the child’s smile return, while she begins to weave another little scarf.

Instead, the poor spruce bunny, fallen and forgotten, found itself floating in the ocean, like a relic of past joys.

Glimpses of a lost happiness. Which I had stumbled upon by chance. And which I suddenly longed to take possession of now.

I spend hours observing it. Almost afraid it will abandon me.

I keep it close to me while I clean the fish for the soup. I keep it close to the headphones when the angels of the abyss sing. I hold it tight to my chest when I sleep.

It is the most precious object I have.

As a fire radiates heat, it radiates serenity.

It is my little lighthouse in this darkness that crowds my soul.

It is the feeble light that you left on.

I promise you I will not lose it again.

Your absence is deafening. It's blinding. It is suffocating. It's sharp. It is poisonous.

And it makes no sense.

I miss you.