Day 4380

It has now been twelve years since we set sail from England. Last week, the only other remaining survivor gave up.
Henry was a strong man. Henry was my friend.

I am starting this journal in the hope that this ship will be found before the elements finally swallow it, because these men deserve more than to vanish without witness.

Our mission was to find a new route to Asia, through the northernmost reaches of Canada. I have no idea where we are now. The old cloth maps started lying to us long ago.

The expedition was cursed from the start. We did not make it five days past Greenland before the cold claimed three men. Hypothermia. One hundred and eighty men became one hundred and seventy-two in less than two weeks after leaving British shores, the sea knew not even our names yet. Five men were set ashore in Greenland due to sickness brought on by the voyage. Lucky bastards. I envy them now.

I can no longer remember the color of England. My home exists only as a concept. My friends are shapes without faces. My wife, my children, have become names worn thin from being spoken to the lonely dark.

Patricia.
Thom.
Olivia.

Four and five years old when I left. This voyage was meant to last a year and a half. I was a different man then. I wonder if they would recognize what returned in my place. I wonder if they would be afraid.

Survival is not free. It demands payment in the only currency that cannot be earned back. A man gives up his soul piece by piece until there is nothing left to bargain with.

I sit here in the captain’s cabin, surrounded by wood that remembers hands long turned to bone. Nothing but regret for company. Regret is alot like the ice that surrounds this ship, at first thin, barely noticeable, but the longer you stop to stare at it, the thicker it grows.

The ship groans around me, its bones bending under the pressure of the wind and sea. It breathes in the cold and exhales frost, stubbornly refusing to die, as if it knows I am not finished suffering.

Day 4381

I neglected to write that the captain died five years into our imprisonment at sea. I believe he would forgive me for occupying his cabin. 

It was his idea… When the lead-poisoning began from the canned food, there were no good choices left. We were no monsters, but we had to eat something. The hunger was not an ache, nor a want, but a hollow screaming from inside the body, a collapsing space that pulled thought, strength, and hope inward. Every breath felt borrowed. Every smell was a promise that would not be kept. You would swallow stone or ice if it would make the screaming stop.

They were already dead. Lead poisoning. Scurvy. Tuberculosis. Some men ate the boiled leather of the dead men’s boots just to feel weight in their stomachs.

It had to be done. There was no way around it.

Yesterday, I desecrated Henry.

I cut him carefully, reverently, like a sacrament performed without a god. I carry him with me now, not as memory, but as flesh. He walks where I walk. He warms me from the inside.

He was the last.

I suppose no one will ever know my taste. The sea has already claimed it.

Day 4382

Loneliness is like a heartbeat echoing inside a godless cathedral, each thud too loud, too alive, proof that I remain when everyone else was allowed to rest.

The ship drifts as a floating mausoleum. The sails hang like funeral veils. The beams creak like bones shifting in their grave. At night, I hear footsteps that stop when I turn to look. Names scratch themselves deeper into the wood of the walls, afraid of being erased.

The sea is not my enemy. That would require intent. It watches instead, vast, patient, eternal. A witness that will outlive my suffering and forget it in an instant. 

Time no longer moves forward here. It circles. The numbers I write are rituals, not measurements. I mark the days the way priests once marked sins. My existence has become my punishment, measured not in the days I scratch into this journal, but in how long a man can endure being the last thing that remembers.

I never knew sadness could be this heavy. The burden has grown so great that my shoulders can no longer bear it. It slips from me and hardens into something worse.

Indifference.

It is like living underwater without drowning. Everything moves in slow, muted currents. Sounds reach me as pressure instead of meaning. Pain arrives already distant, as though it belongs to someone else. My life unfolds behind glass I cannot shatter.

I do not think I feel anything anymore. I think that all stopped a long time ago.

I feel no hatred toward the men who sealed the cans poorly, who let the food rot and the lead seep in. They killed us to save a few pennies per tin. I feel no wrath toward those who chose the lowest bidder, who spared no expense on the ship, the men, the pay, yet economized on the one thing we could not survive without.

I feel no anger.

Only bitterness.
Only emptiness.

I do not wish to live. I do not wish to die. I want nothing. I crave nothing. I hope for nothing.

I am nothing. Desire itself has rotted away with the tides beneath the ice below me.

I try to remember my wife’s face. My children. The last memory that made me feel. 

Nothing. 

When I am finally finished, the ship will still groan. The ice will continue tightening its grip. The sea will close over us all without ceremony.

And nothing in this world of ice will notice, nothing will ever witness, that I was ever here to begin with. Nothing to forget…no one to remember…