Off the back of the boat was an incredible wake. A swath of turbulent white, bringing the endless blue to a boiling rage that any had dared pass through it. White knuckled atop a nylon skinned inner-tube dragged behind 45 horses of suburban lakeside mid-life crises he once learned that there wasn’t much difference between the two colour’s of water, aside from a desire to get outside of the wake towards fun and reckless speed. It was the wake that got up your nose, through your sinuses and stung going past your tonsils down your throat our back out the mouth.
It was a fairly invalid perspective as he looked 4 stories down from the deck to a wake 2 lanes of traffic wide, but regardless there it was instantly generating it’s own context and resurrecting a self that was sunburned and squealing with laughter momentarily inside the body of a man standing a few hundred meters from stacks of shipping containers. Each their own Schrödinger’s box, simultaneously full of or not full of anything you could imagine – the wave function only finally collapsing into confirmation or denial once the seals were cracked and the heavy doors swung open. It was an overly ambitious description fit for any box, except he was around long enough to know that unlike boxes of the cardboard variety there truly could be any inside.
He had been staring at one earlier that had a side done up with what he thought he recognized as Italian railroad graffiti. The containers were picked up in Halifax en route to New York, but that was just small talk. Though the letters weren’t the typical balloon shape with the most intergalactic of motorcycle helmet airbrushed colouring that reminded him of a Verona, there was distinct pasta chewiness that went with the familiarity of the 3 faces. Another moment or two and perhaps he would have been transported to a time of being fat and peppered with just the slightest amount of black truffle arm in arm on the way back to an Air BNB in Florence.
Instead he was transported to the back of the boat by his own two feet to stare at a wake he had never really seen before nor would ever exactly see again. Wasn’t much longer until he was back on land, embodied and wandering through a dimension of permanence that the oceans will never permit.