The Last True Poets of the Sea

He’s not even interested in the treasure. The whole point is the adventure. At least, for his crew, that’s the point. The last true poets of the sea, he calls them. People for whom discovery—like, the concept of the journey—is the treasure itself.

Here's what I should've said: I saw your face and the world was different

I leave behind a wake of splintered wood and broken buildings and scared, know-nothing boys.

Survival was its own quest: we needed to choose to survive over and over again. We had to wash up on shore, and we had to choose to keep washing up every single day. We had to let the survival accrue, pebble after pebble, building a beach from a million tiny moments until suddenly we stopped, looked around, and thought, on a Saturday in Maine, I'm glad we're here.

The puzzle's an incomplete circus, the pieces touching each other in all these ways, and there's a hitch in our back from where you've hunched, but you've done it. You've put this thing together. Seams like veins pump blood through this cobbled-together catastrophe, this broken, beautiful mess.

and then Liv does something inexplicable: she lays her hand flat across her own chest and presses...They’re standing far away, but Violet can feel Liv’s hand on her own heart.

This was a new station with music so lovely, so frightening, so foreign, I hadn’t even known to search for its signal.

In the fog, she kissed me once, very quickly, and it felt like courage.

It was the first time I'd said ‘survival’ aloud. Sam had survived. He’d survived, and I’d survived, too. Now we would survive together.

We had a long way to go, but by then we’d be so knowledgeable, so wise, that between the two of us, we’d be able to name all the constellations.

Why did adventures have to happen away from home? Couldn’t the puzzle be an adventure, too?

Him, her, a whale, you, what does it matter? You both saw the wreck, and you both swam up.

He was a jellyfish being asked to float on land. Maybe life, for him, would always be hard.

I imagined her springing from her father’s head, fully formed, like Athena.

* I sat there on my mothers bed and the pain worked its way through me. She knew what to say to her son, and she knew what to say to Sam, and to me. I wanted that to be my inheritance.

By comparison, the Titanic sank in two hours, forty minutes. Pretty impressive, to have sunk to the bottom even faster than the twentieth century’s greatest shipwreck. Especially considering I was only sixteen. I didn’t even have a driver’s license, but I was an expert in the art of catastrophe.

All I see in my future is being this way. Forever.

We’d be a love out of time and space, ethereal, destined, and her dreams would take shape around my song. I’d teach the hills to say her name, and the winds and the trees and water, too, so that the elements would love her, so that everywhere she went, no matter where, she’d hear the world crying out for, calling over and over: “Liv Stone, Liv Stone, Liv Stone!

To the wreck hunters," Orion said, raising his water bottle, "And to whale songs." "To truthing," said Liv. "To tea leaves," said Felix. We kept toasting: To Fidelia and Ransome. To the rest of the Lyric passengers whose bones has been picked clean by fish. To adventures. Our voices overlapped and were indistinguishable. To baseball caps, to Patsy Cline. To whiskey and blow jobs and cunnilingus, birth control, treasure, no treasure, sleeping bags, bug spray, headphones, and crosswords. "To family," I called. "Surviving," said Sam. "Please can you keep it down!" yelled a voice from inside the kayakers' tent. "To angry, reluctant chaperones," Mariah stage-whispered. We all collapsed into stifled giggles, then put out the fire and trekked down to the beach to stage an impromtu, perfectly imperfect reading of Cousteau! by cell-phone light. Same had brought the latest printout of the script with him. That night, it didn't matter what had come before and what was going to come after. In that moment, we were the last true poets of the sea, and what mattered more than anything else was our quest.

The warm invitation was just like my dad, too. He'd move a stack of papers from his extra chair and run lines with me while his computer pinged and his phone buzzed. He probably lost hours of sleep as a result. Just another kindness I'd taken for granted.

Acting is hubris. You not only attempt to faithfully represent someone else's experience, but you do so in front of a (hopefully full) auditorium. What makes you worthy of being watched and listened to? How do you convince an audience to stay, rather than waltz out the door and hit the nearest bar? Forget a full auditorium: how do you convince one measly person that you're more interesting than whatever is happening on her phone? And if you can distract them long enough to do that, how do you overcome the seemingly insurmountable challenge of winning a complete stranger's affection?

A show in progress. A story unfolding. The theater goes dark for a scene change. The orchestra, though, continues to play. A riff on the show’s dominant melody fills the house—somber or suspenseful or sweepingly romantic—and the tone of the next scene starts there, with the music.

The moon, then," I said. "The sun," Liv said. "Both.

Romeo and Juliet once had a conversation that became a sonnet. Alone, they were good; together they were art.

Here's a secret, too" she said. "Most adults don't grow up all the way either. Only the best ones, like your uncle, figure how to make that look good

I had never had friends before, not like this.

Sounds like you'd do a bunch," Liv breathed. Beneath the brim of her hat, I found her eyes. "You would not rest," I said.