low-talk liquor

In amongst the drinking and packing and last-chance plays to tidy up the women who I always figured might be alive to my way of thinking, there have been the unannounced visits from good men, visits from sailors, sea-dog skippers who have put small boats to sea in all the corners of the world.  
 
They are the men who come with rum, to sit on the porch and talk in low voices of the ways an ocean trip can go sideways. We talk in low voices because it is the right way to speak of the wide open place, and we talk with rum because it makes us brave enough to admit fear.    
 
Those men always ask the good questions, about plan b and c and the plan after that, talking through the stories they’ve heard, and the ones that they've lived. They talk about the boats that went unprepared, almost angry for that special kind of vanity, about that kind of failure, about that kind of too-stupid-to-imagine.  
 
They come to sit with me because there is an unsaid hope, a hope that talking these things through will make them immune to vanity themselves, when they again take to the place we can only know by leaving, by leaving the dull and deadly safety of the shore.  
 
We drink too much, and why not, but never does the drinking turn to boasting, not with the kind of sailor who is worth a damn, the kind of man who harbours honest things.  
 
The last man came in the middle of the day, under bright sunlight, and we drank and talked these thoughts. The end of it, when he had to leave, to go and catch a plane back to his own boat on the other side of the continent, we shook hands and held a steady moment, wished each other well and turned our backs to walk our own paths. “Good on you mate”.  
 
Stoic as fuck, all part of the act.  
 
The rum will fade, and tomorrow, or a few days after, we’ll put to sea holding a secret wish, the both of us, that we told our stories well, that the sea heard our low-voice respect, and that the things we talked of do not come to pass, not for us, not this trip.  
 
We are dreamers, dreamers with good hands, and bodies that are just the usual failing meat, but we are sailors too, and sailors put a good boat to the sea to find out for ourselves if we are the men we hope we are. Eventually the answer, no matter the man,  is always no, but not this trip, not yet, no not this time.  
 
Sinking, or burning, or drowning doesn't matter. The thing that matters is to do it well, to do all of it well, and if the ending is bad then that is the way the ending went, and other men will maybe tell of us in low voices with rum in their hearts, on other days. That too will be a kind of life.