Torn

SHIP'S LOG
The schooner Anna-Maria, Port o' call - London
Somewhere upon the Atlantic Ocean

Honeymoon Trip, Day Three, 0300 hour
August, 1888 

I told her.

I was afraid she was withdrawing from me, that she was leaving me.

Ironic, isn't it?  It is the very thing she tells me she is so afraid of, that I will leave her.

I am not even man enough to tell her it is the same thing that I feel.

But I told her last night.  Blurted it out because she was leaving anyway.  I could feel it from her.  She kept saying she needed to be alone.  I was afraid she meant it.   It was not the right time, it was not the right place,  but I had no choice.

And now she knows.

I am not the man she believed me to be.

She will put it all together eventually.

She will soon understand that the marks on my back, the ones I cannot talk about, are from that time.

She will soon understand that the dream that haunts me is the one I lived, the one I cannot talk about, the one I think about all the time.

She will soon understand the closeness it keeps, lurking beneath the surface of my every waking moment, ready to pounce and steal my sanity permanently.

She will soon understand that it was not only my grief for Pene's loss that drove me to the brink of my sanity and beyond.  It was the loss of the one person that I shared it all with, the loss of one other soul in the world who knew and had given me absolution, who refused to stop loving me even when I could no longer love myself.

Even the children do not know all of it.  They do not know the choices I made.  They see me as some great hero, as the man who saved them, but they do not know it all.  I think sometimes Benjamen suspects there is something else to it all, but he does not ask.  We do not speak of it. 

He had to deal with it that way and I understand that.

I cannot burden him with it.  He has his own ghosts to live with.

Pene was the only other one who knew the whole of it but I waited too late to share it with her.  I waited until my distance, and my silence, had already become a wedge between us.  She left me a long time before she left me.  It was not her fault. 

That will not happen with Gabriella, for I have told her.  Too soon, I think, but she knows now, for better or worse.  But I will not let it bind her to me.  I will not let it destroy her.  I love her that much.  I know what I have to do.

 I shall give her the option, as I did not give it to Pene.  I  shall look at the charts in the morning, determine where we are, and sail the Anna-Maria to the nearest port of civilization.  There Gabriella can make her way back to Jon and Maddy, they will take care of her. 

I will not ask her to stay with me, now that she knows. 

How could she?

How could anyone?

I think when she goes, I will go, too.  I will not fight it any longer.