Storms - chapter 5

I am releasing a song every month or so for the next little while. Together, these songs will make up an album called ‘Storms’. With each song I’ll release a chapter of a story. Together, the chapters will tell a tale of two childhood friends - Jacob and June. The songs are part of this story. The album and the story each stand alone. But both are expressions of a strange and difficult love. A love that insisted on existing. These words and melodies are the best I could do, even if the love had something else in mind.

A thousand kisses later Jacob and June are living beneath the waves. The planet is alive, its green fingers strum at the currents, a living landscape blooms for them, teeming with alien life. The two sleepwalkers breathe underwater in a world of new colours and new physics, with new equations for love such as: The deeper they dive, the higher they get. They no longer walk, they swim, like human fish traversing submerged mountains and valleys and forests with slow dancing trees and rocks with eyes that watch them.

It’s not long until Jacob flies, but they measure time in kisses and so they live for now in a sweetcorn multiverse of nearly-endless moments. Time is not fixed, it is just a theory. They seek forever in every day with lips that brush up against infinity whenever they meet.

But sometimes they wake to rough seas. The whirlwind of longing comes from out of nowhere. Every kiss is made more intense by a veiled anger. Anger is necessary in battle. Theirs is a battle with time. The anger is made hotter by love. Their love has its own microclimate and there is no shelter from the storms.

It is the last day of autumn and Jacob has spent a week at sea with his friend Adam. He is on his way back to June but she has not answered his messages and her phone has been switched off. She does that sometimes. Disappears. Lately she has been doing it when she is right there beside him.

Jacob stops on the way home at the edge of town and sits on his car roof looking out at the bay, the jagged city climbing like giant stairs out of the water in the distance. He always feels good after a week at sea with Adam.

Every day before dawn they set out on Adam’s boat. Adam calls it the temple. The darkness gradually drains out of a blue dome sky, the sea a sheet of glass. They load the hundred metre lines with bait on the way out and then lower the anchor and drop the lines, watch them sink to the bottom. And then, they wait for it.

The sun arrives. The moment it touches the horizon the sea explodes with light and for a brief eternity the world is a vast golden temple. It lights up every dark corner of Jacob’s mind. And all the things hiding there scurry to find shelter, but there is no hiding from the bright eye in the sky.

Adam calls it the divine orgasm.

‘I have a feeling this is what it feels like to be born. And to die.’ He once said.

And Jacob replied, ‘So then maybe we die and are reborn each day.’

To which Adam replied, ‘Exactly. And I am Adam, first man. But everyone’s task is to be eternally first man. To see everything for the first time, every day. One must never miss the sunrise. It’s the main event.’

Jacob recorded all this in his mind.

On the last day there was a storm and the waves were high on their way back to the jetty. Jacob loves the sea when she is angry. They arrived wet and tired, hair stuck to their brows and cheeks red with action, wide grins across their faces. After selling the fish to the wholesaler they went to the pub to drink a beer and say goodbye.

Adam is Jacob’s only friend aside from June and his mother. But Adam understood him from the start. On the first day of school he took him under his big arm and instinctively knew that it was his job to help steer him safely through the boobytrapped world. The school yard was treacherous terrain for Jacob and without Adam he would not have survived. Jacob’s love for Adam is deep and grateful and forever.

Adam raised his mug of beer and banged it against Jacob’s.

Jacob said, ‘Thank you, my good friend.’

‘No goodbyes, buddy.’

‘But this is the last time I’ll get a chance to say it.’

‘No, it is the first. Remember, always the first.’

Adam has the kind of smile that renders everything he has said before it beautiful and true. He smiled that smile for the last, the first time.

It’s nighttime when Jacob climbs down off the roof of his car and continues on towards June and Jimmy. He arrives an hour later at their shack and sees June sitting at her desk through the window. Jimmy runs out to greet him and lets out a howl of ‘where have you been’. Then June comes down the porch stairs like a slow avalanche. Her slight frame belies her heaviness. There is a wild storm brewing. Like the sea, Jacob loves and fears June when she is angry. Jimmy looks at him with pity and takes himself inside to hide under the desk.

Jacob takes a deep breath and braces himself, ready to ride the whirlwind.

‘Are you ok?’ Jacob asks, wrapping his arms around June.

She remains stone still. She wishes she could be angry with him. She tries.

‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?’ It is a half hearted attempt.

‘Creep, I’m here, it’s me.’ Jacob looks her in the eyes.

‘Are you? Is it?’ She looks back at him,

Jacob starts singing. He knows it’s cheating but he also knows it will do the trick.

Half of what I say is meaningless

But I say it just to reach you, Julia

Julia, ocean child, calls me

June is angry but Jacob has a sweet voice and she can’t resist singing along.

Julia, sleeping sand

Silent cloud, touch me

Jimmy pokes his head out the front door, checking if it’s safe to emerge. He loves to hear them sing together. He joins them and sits at their feet and sensing the longing, he howls softly.

‘Let’s sleep outside tonight,.’ Jacob suggests.

They take blankets and head up the mountain and spend the night huddled together, the three of them. The night weaves its web of stars. They wake now and then and talk, half awake, half asleep. And now and then a meteor burns across the sky. They press together, ever closer, but never close enough. Jacob knows, he cannot leave.

He wakes with the sun, all his dreams forgotten.

He is alone.