Life and Metaphors

"It's such a cliche to talk about how sharks die if they stop swimming," I said, watching the water for dorsal fins knifing through the surface. We'd been at sea for long enough that I was proud of the fact that I hadn't grown queasy yet.

"Can something be a cliche if its true?" Alyx asked. She'd been giddy all day, like she had been at the start of our relationship. She matched my volume, speaking so that I heard her over the boat's engine but not so loudly that anyone else would.

"I don't know. People just always approach sharks through metaphor, you know? Like, someone is a shark if they have ambition that keeps them from ever stopping. Or if you just watched Jaws a shark is a symbol of chaos or death or whatever. A shark is never just a shark."

"Let sharks be sharks," she said with the intonation of a chant at a political rally.

"Which metaphor are you looking for?"

"Hm?"

"You know. Why do you like sharks? What is it about sharks that speaks to you?"

She laughed. "That's like asking you why you like turtles."

"They're stable, for one thing," I said. "They bring their home with them, so they're always secure. And I always like the whole slow and steady wins--"

"Okay, okay, I see your point." The wetsuit they'd provided for her swim looked incredible on her. That wasn't a surprise, though. Even after being together for five years, I still nursed a serious crush on her. Sure, some of the initial fire had burned off--it was hard to maintain breathless awe regarding your partner after a batch of bad burritos in a one-bathroom apartment--but then she'd pull her hair up into a ponytail or try a different shade of lipstick, and it would hit me again. Oh, shit, you're gorgeous and I'm way, way too lucky. "I just don't think that your whole metaphor thing is how I see the world."

We were silent for a while, which was surprisingly easy on the boat. The hum of the engine provided enough noise that it never felt awkward to let the conversation lag, and remaining steady as the boat required some attention. It was a sun-drenched afternoon, so idyllic that I wished that nothing about it would change. If the world stayed like that forever, I would have been content. I knew that I should just shut up and savor the moment, but when the right idea occurred to me, I couldn't stop myself from talking.

"Sharks could also be a metaphor for contentment," I said.

She raised an eyebrow at that.

"Did you know that sharks evolved before ferns?"

"That can't possibly be true."

"It is."

She kept that eyebrow raised and angled her face away from me, suspicion raised to the next level.

"They evolved like a hundred million years before ferns. They've been on this planet for so long that it's like... it's like they're a perfected form of themselves. An apex. There's something content about that permanence."

"Something tells me you're over-simplifying."

"Well... maybe a little."

She punched my shoulder, then leaned her head against me. I put my arm around her shoulder. Five years together gave us enough time to see ups and downs, to get to know what made us similar and what made us different. The second year had been the easiest. This last year had been the hardest. We'd become different people than we were five years ago, and I couldn't deny that every time I looked in the mirror. I was going gray, and my face looked haggard. I blamed the stresses from work and hoped that once the company stabilized I'd de-age a little, but even I knew that was wishful thinking. So I still had a crush on Alyx, but I couldn't blame her if she no longer had a crush on me.

Still, for the day she was happy. It had cost us enough to give her this happy day, but if it bought us a few months that were more like our second year together than our fifth, it would be more than worth it. I'd give anything for that happy stability.

With her head still leaned against my shoulder, Alyx looked up at the cage swinging from the crane on the side of the boat. Eventually she would get into that cage, and the boat's crew would lower her down into the world of the animals that she loved so much. She yearned for adventures like that, so here I was, showing her that even if I wasn't going to change into a wetsuit--it looked way better on her than it would on me anyways--I could be here for the adventures. Maybe I didn't need to be in the cage, but I would be on-board to hear all about it when she got out of the water.

That could be enough, right?

"Look," she said, pointing out to the water. I squinted against the light reflecting off the glittering surface, but after a minute I saw it: a dorsal fin. Alyx bounced on her feet, flashing me a grin that was all teeth. I did my best to reflect some of that bliss back on her.

Then the dorsal fin disappeared.

"I'm getting a tattoo when we get back," Alyx said. "A shark."

"Tattoos are also a metaphor for permanence."

She laughed, rocking against my body.

"No, seriously."

She stepped away from me, blinking like she'd just woken from a pleasant dream. "Hm?"

"Which metaphor speaks to your experience of sharks? Ambition, death... maybe perfect contentment?" I hoped that my tone didn't put my thumb too heavily on the scale. "I think a tattoo implies that it's permanence."

She laughed. "That's the thing. I don't love sharks because of some metaphorical resonance, okay? That's your thing, not mine. I love sharks because... because I love sharks. Because they're cool."

"Yeah, but--"

"Do you know what the problem is with metaphors? They're simple. Over-simple. They force connections that aren't there, or they conveniently forget about the details that don't fit the parallel that someone's trying to make. Sharks aren't death. They're not the embodiment of ambition, or the embodiment of contentment. They're sharks. No more, no less."

I stared at her for a long time, and I wondered how many more times I would stare at her. Maybe I would still be looking into those beautiful eyes when we turned 80, or maybe we wouldn't make it another year.

I wanted her to assure me, but she wasn't a liar, so she wasn't going to.

Still, after a long second, she leaned into my shoulder again. I thought she closed her eyes, although I couldn't be certain, and I felt the familiarity of her weight against me, and the excitement she still caused, and I knew that far too soon she would be off of the boat and into the water. She would swim with the sharks, and she would have her once-in-a-lifetime experience, and when it was over we would go home together. And things wouldn't be perfectly easy, but they probably wouldn't be impossibly hard. Probably.

I held onto her for a bit longer. The sea was stretched out so far that it could be infinite: infinitely wide and infinitely deep. But on this moment we were on the deck together.