What Ahab Meant

 

A million years ago I started a series of fictional reports about books I'd never read. I wrote one on Jane Austen, then one about Moby Dick, which I never posted because my dog died and I moved four times and Donald Trump was elected and I stopped writing for a while because I thought I could only write well when I was sad, or drinking, or it was late at night and I needed to talk to myself. 

Over the last four years I started going to bed much earlier, became much happier, and stopped drinking entirely. In that order, which is a weird order, but it worked. Somewhere in that reset I got really superstitious and wondered if writing sad fiction influenced a sad reality. Hence the pause.

I no longer think that's true. But I've still never read Moby Dick. 

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I've never read Moby Dick. Six hundred pages of shattered ego and whale blubber. We want what we cannot have, some ambition is too much. Et cetera. We get it. 

What I did not realize, what Ahab might have told me: There are some things we are supposed to chase. Otherwise - they will follow.

The things you have been fleeing are more patient than you. They will track you through years. And when you eventually, inevitably, pause for breath: they will devour you.

I chased a thing until I stopped. The palms of my hands, the soles of my feet, they bled with the effort. I was a chafed, raw hull. I cried until the salt cleaned my wounds. I cried until the tears ran clear. And that's when it found me.

"I love you," it said, finally. 

It was all I'd ever wanted to hear, but spit ran acid down my throat, my guts lit up, hummed: Run, run, run, run.  But who can run on flesh torn to ribbons? You cannot stop begging to be prey once the predator pounces.

My white whale.

They tell you to strike when the spear is high, the moment the whale hesitates. I saw it hesitate.

Or did I?

The whale has its own agenda. It haunts you, shadows from leagues below.

It rolls over and shows you its belly.

Close up, the whale has countless scars. Could your harpoon even make a mark amidst the scabs and scrapes, the jagged lines of the others who tried before. Everyone of them failed. And you, thinking you could make a difference.

At night you lie awake and trace the scars, the impermeable membranes. At night, it doesn't seem like there's room for another.

In the daylight, you are able to hold your tongue, tears abated. In the daylight, you are able to sort the thoughts into piles: what should not be said, what should be pondered, what should be buried. In the daylight, you consult your maps.

They lead anywhere else. That is not the advice you were looking for.

So you try and make a map of the scars instead. They all lead into one another. Dead end, new end, dead end. You try again. Make a map of the routes taken, the paths attempted. The voyages. 

All ends.

What hope is there for you?