The world has shrunk by becoming immense.

We have left the coast behind, and the horizon is but a blend of sea and sky.

Gray, endless sky. Dark, bottomless sea.

One can get lost in them. This we all know. We remember, without knowing why, the names of ships and crews that reached their final port in the depths of that watery abyss.

We are alone with our schooner.

We shield ourselves from infinity with the wood of the ship, with the sails and thrumming lines that grip the wind. With our muscles under the sun, with the thundering orders of the First Mate.

We check the cargo, tightening the tense ropes as if we could secure our position, reinforce the certainty that we shall remain here, though the scale and indifference of our surroundings threaten to unmoor our minds.

Then do we remember.

Always late.

The world is naught but these men, the deck, the cellar, the gunwales, the hatches, the cabins.

We have reduced the universe to what lies between stem and stern.

To fall into the water is to leave the world.

That the world might leave us is equally unimaginable.

It must remain with us. The schooner floats firmly upon our faith that she will always be here. The notion that she might shipwreck, that the waters might penetrate her interior, is as inconceivable as that the sky might crack open, letting black nothingness swirl into the world.

Yet, it has happened.

Boats becoming coral; men feeding fish never lit by the sun.

Such truths I do not mention, do not scrawl with fresh ink.

The Captain’s log is no company, either.

Those entries I compose for the ship owners and the men who will inherit this ship when I retire.

The voice that I offer to the memory of the trip is different. To read it is to meet another man who is yet me. A man who speaks only of facts, of details devoid of nuance.

At dusk, I go on deck and I hear the men who stayed on guard speak. They do not pronounce words because they have something meaningful to share, but because silence sits heavy on our hearts when we know it looms larger than we.

The Demeter speaks. We know her language, her creaking chatter, her canvas whispers, her dry words of wood. Her voice is for us; we summon it when we push her with the wind, when we mark a route for her.

She tells me that all is well, that we leave behind knots and miles and kilometers, that she advances toward the coasts of Turkey as if something we wanted awaits us there.