Sea Turtle Island (21 text messages to my little sister)

[i love you]


Sea Turtle island was a special place. Mariners from countries all over the world looked for it. She was a rumor in back rooms where ale came heavy and smoke came heavier. During the opium wars it was said that the entire fortune of the fields could not match the wealth of the jade a man could pick up with his bare hands on her shores.

All of the way around her, the beaches glowed brilliant green by day and glittered by starlight underneath the moon's watchful eye. A few returned from her and would share their stories at the pubs near the docks and the jetties. For each one there was an entire crew lost to the oceans of the pacific. Legend perpetuated itself, but not without cause. Every line of history around the pacific rim contained stories of a brilliant green gem, half buried in the fickle waves. Every story of conquest and hero through the ages held a reference to her.

Sea Turtle island was a beauty and a much sung wonder through time. There was a party of rapscallions, a collection of never say die's who thought otherwise. They believed, circulating the shorelines and exchanging words with so called survivors, they knew that if the winds of the pacific would only blow their way for enough time, if they had enough within themselves, if the ifs, enough of them, could and would break their way, they might find that island made of pure jade.

They gathered their supplies and they enjoyed their ale and they laughed, telling of their mission, and watching faces go pale in the dark lit pubs. The patrons knowing they would be raising their glasses to yet another well meaning funeral with no bodies to put in the ground. The garden of headstones grown larger and more crowded and for nothing. They laughed and caroused and had their fill and they went out on that sea, chasing streamers of myth and history.

The crew of that good ship came apart. Came apart. Came apart. Mid voyage some had second thoughts. On the last weeks others wondered if there was enough on board to get back, the island of jade being without so much as a butterfly to eat, less it be blown that far off course to land and roost on a thing made only of precious, precious stone. There was a mutiny and then another among the ones who did not die in the first, and still Sea Turtle island was yet to be gained by navigation or map stolen or map drawn by one or another drunkard claiming to have been and come home.

The oars would rock against the ships hull in the current, unattended because there were no hands. When the wind died and that ship of small men dead circled on her own for weeks without end the day finally arrived. The bow dug into sand, but not a sand any man ever saw. It was made of fractured gem stones, a rainbow beneath the waves that glimmered like the iris of an angel miles wide.

And as the hull of that ship washed against the skeletons of dozens of others, ever more skeletons nestled within their sides, Sea Turtle island shone bright against the licks of frost topped glass blue wave peaks inside the pacific where the currents take men to die.