Naked Horizons

The thing about forgetting your clothes is that nobody forgets their clothes. You forget your phone charger, your toothbrush, the bag of snacks your mom pressed into your hands at the dock. You don't forget every single piece of fabric you own.

But we did.

It was Marcus who noticed first. We were three days out from San Diego, the coast a thin gray line behind us, and he came up from the cabin with his face all wrong. Not angry. Confused. That special confusion that looks like a man trying to remember a dream.

"Where are all the duffel bags?" he said.

I was at the helm, the wheel warm and sticky under my palms. The Pacific stretched out like blue glass. No wind yet. We'd been motoring since dawn.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean there are no duffel bags. No backpacks. No nothing."

Leo laughed from the bow, where he was pretending to check the jib sheets. "Bullshit. Mine's right there." He pointed to the bench seat. There was nothing on the bench seat. The laugh died in his throat.

We all went down together. The main cabin was clean. Too clean. The bunks had sheets, thin and salt-stiff, but no clothes piled at the foot. No bags shoved under the table. The storage lockers held life jackets, flares, a first aid kit, a box of instant ramen that had expired the year prior. No jeans. No shirts. No underwear. No socks.

Marcus opened every hatch. Leo pulled out the floorboards. I stood in the middle of it all, my hands going cold, because I remembered. I remembered the parking lot. I remembered loading the coolers and the fishing rods and the crate of beer. I remembered Marcus's girlfriend crying on the dock. I did not remember anyone carrying bags down the ramp.

"Oh god," I said.

It hit them at the same time. The three of us standing there in what we'd worn since we left. The same shirts. The same shorts. The same everything.

We'd spent six months planning this trip. Six months of charts and provisions and safety briefings. We bought a boat together, a thirty-eight foot ketch with a cracked mast step and a diesel engine that smoked like a chimney. We named her the *Sea Change*. We thought we were so clever.

And we forgot our clothes.

"We can turn back," Leo said. He said it like he was offering to saw off his own arm.

The wind picked up. The sails started to flap. I looked at the fuel gauge. We'd burned through a third of our diesel just getting this far. Turning back meant another three days running the engine, then refueling, then starting over. We'd burn through our entire budget before we even left the continent.

"We can't turn back," I said.

Marcus sat down on the companionway steps. He was wearing cargo shorts and a faded t-shirt from a brewery that closed four years ago. The man had packed for a two year voyage. He had a spreadsheet. He had color-coded packing cubes. And he left them all in his girlfriend's trunk.

"So what do we do?" he said.

I didn't have an answer. Neither did Leo. We stood there in our stinking clothes, three men who had somehow managed to sail a boat into the ocean without a single change of underwear between them. The sun was hot through the hatches. The boat rocked gently. Somewhere a seagull laughed.

That was two months ago.

We've been living like feral animals ever since. We wash our clothes in the ocean and hang them on the lifelines to dry. We wear them wet. We wear them stiff with salt. We rotate: one day on, one day airing out. The shorts I'm wearing right now have been patched with duct tape and fishing line. My shirt has a hole in the left armpit that's big enough to stick my head through. I've stopped trying.

The strange thing is how normal it's become. You'd think living without clothes would be the whole story, but it's not. It's just the background noise. The real story is everything else. The real story is what happens when three people who can't stand each other anymore are trapped on a thirty-eight foot boat with nothing but salt water and each other's body odor.

Marcus is the one who wants to follow the rules. He's the one who still tries to fold his shirt when he takes it off, even though there's nowhere to put it except back on his body. He's the one who keeps the logbook, who marks our position twice a day, who insists we ration the instant ramen even though we've caught more fish than we can eat. He's the one who still calls his girlfriend on the satellite phone, which is fine except she's been with someone else for three weeks and hasn't told him yet.

Leo is the one who stopped caring. He sleeps naked now. He eats with his hands. He pisses off the starboard side without checking which way the wind is blowing. I've seen him stand on the bow in the rain, arms out, letting the water wash the salt off his skin. He says it's freedom. I think it's something closer to breaking.

And me. I'm the one who keeps us going. I'm the one who steers when nobody else wants to. I'm the one who dives under the boat to scrape the barnacles off the hull. I'm the one who doesn't ask questions because I'm afraid of the answers.

We're somewhere south of the equator now. The stars are different. The water is a color I don't have a name for. We've been island hopping, mostly, stopping at places that don't appear on any chart. Small dots of land where the people speak languages we don't understand and look at us like we're ghosts.

Last week we pulled into an atoll with a village on it. Maybe fifty people. They came down to the beach to watch us anchor. We waved. They waved back. Then we had to decide who was going ashore, because we couldn't all go, because someone had to stay with the boat, because we've learned that lesson the hard way.

Marcus went. He put on his cleanest shirt, which is to say the one with the fewest holes. He came back three hours later with a bundle of fabric. Clothes. Real clothes. Woven from some kind of palm fiber, soft and strange. He held them up like trophies.

"They make them," he said. "They trade them. We can get more."

I looked at the clothes in his hands. They were beautiful. They were also the first step into something I didn't understand. A transaction. A relationship. A thread connecting us to a place we weren't planning to stay.

I told him we'd think about it.

That was last week. The clothes are still in the locker. We haven't touched them. And tonight, as the sun bleeds orange into the sea and Leo stands naked on the bow and Marcus sits below writing in his logbook, I realize I don't know what we're doing anymore.

We forgot our clothes.

But we forgot other things too. We forgot to ask what we were running from. We forgot to wonder if we'd ever go back. We forgot that the world keeps spinning even when you're not looking at it.

And now we're here, halfway to nowhere, with nothing but salt and skin and the slow terrible knowledge that you can't outrun yourself. Not on any ocean. Not in any weather.

The wind is picking up. A storm is coming. I can feel it in my bones, in the way the boat shifts, in the way the air goes tight and electric. Marcus will want to batten down. Leo will want to ride it out.

I don't know what I want.

I just know we're running out of time.