5.3

What boundaries lie before us, friends? What unseen depths below? The sky streaks an amber hue as the last gasp of day drives the sails onward. The whole of creation is glimmered with an excited shell of animate energy and the sea itself phosphoresces beneath the hull. The only sound to my ear is a soft lap of warm salt water on the boards and the murmur of your voices at the stern. Is this true contentment? I don't suppose I would know. I've been hungry all my life to see the things no one has yet seen, driven to be the foremost in my field. What has it bought me, except desperation?
Perhaps I curse the day for its brevity, the wind for its sloth. Perhaps I begrudge you the time you spend fraternal as I fly further from life. Perhaps I have not been exploring, but rather seeding thin slices of myself across the vastness of the unexplored globe, planting my self-worth in the rock of a jagged peninsula or the alluvial soil at the mouth of a river. Perhaps I have now cut too deeply and glanced the center mass, and I have now bled too freely and finally feel the primal weakness of our race. There isn't much left that's human of me, you'll see.
What vastness, what terror! The leagues of sea-spray between me and home straiten me like a trap. Keen remorse! The suddenness with which it takes me puts a chill in the last soul I have left. What has become of her; I must know. Is she dead? Alone? Or with--but better dead, for my lot. And I better dead for hers. Maybe the gulls would carry the news of me to her, and she could mourn in proper season, dull, forget, live on. Your voices carry me from my reverie as you peal laughter at some coarse nothing. The moment is meaningless now, and it is safe to speak aloud for the first time in days. My voice cuts raspy against my throat, an unfamiliar guest.
"What of Penelope? Do I sail to her ghost?"
Drifting in the animate wastes of dying day, the words are caught up and away from my ears, whipped East by divine provenance or spiting fate, to drift over my home, my son, my wife.