The Inanimate Suffering of the Drowning Kind

People aren’t things, they’re beings. And April 15th did not let them be. But today we examine the perspective of “things." Did they suffer too? Let’s see:

• A window can only show an iceberg - but not the damage it can do. Strong enough to watch the menace approach, but shatters when the water bursts through.
• A spoon doesn’t feel the bite of the waves like a child does, as she clings to her mother. A candlestick isn’t afraid of the darkness, though the ocean was a black like no other.

• A lamp shade cannot spread the light, onto the bottom of the ocean floor. And two lovers lost to the expanse of it, can’t both fit on the surface of a door.
• A perfume bottle could never mask the scent of fear. Of terror. Of fright. A candelabra cannot burn fiercely enough to pierce the darkness of that deathly night.
• A cabinet doesn’t contain the terror quite like a vessel, submerging into an abyss. Caging screams and screamers and once-upon-a-time dreamers - a cabinet doesn’t have a family to miss.
• A pillowcase doesn’t sink quite as swiftly as the body of a father of two. A violin doesn’t scream in as harsh a tone as the woman whose fingers turned blue.
• A dining table doesn’t bear the weight of grief like a parent, trapped, unable to say goodbye. Or the child wondering why she won’t see them again. Or the other parent, trying to explain why.
• A bookshelf does not hold a story that tells a tale as disturbing as then. No words on a page could display such a day. This tragedy didn’t come from a pen.
• A grande piano is not quite as grande as the ship that it stood inside. Nor the ocean the ship sailed along. Nor the number of living, who died.
• A silver platter doesn’t reflect the taste of the saltiness of the sea. That stings the very wounds it inflicts. Death served to 1,503.
• A clock can only tell the time - not stop it, nor turn it back. Nor speed up so the pain can end. It simply ticks until it all fades to black.
• A letter written with the Titanic’s pen won’t ever make it to whom it was for. Those final words that a son handwrote, forever lost to the ocean floor.
• A fur coat cannot warm the woman who’s submerged in that infinite water. A menu that read, “baked haddock, sharp sauce,” now the fish feed off the body of her daughter.
• Bronze cherubs once adorning the staircase, no longer the only angels there on deck. The night before they lived and laughed, alive. Unaware they’d be souls, bound to that wreck.
• A pocket watch can do what a person cannot: it can survive this fateful tale. Stuck at the time that it all fell apart, immortalising its very last second of sail.
• A lifeboat isn’t always exactly that, when the boat cannot carry all lives. Prioritising the children and their mothers first, but these mothers were also wives.
• The hull is the only body, unhuman, that didn’t suffer as though it had a heart. Like the bodies on board, all human, alike, on a journey only ever destined to start.
• The propeller didn’t do any of that - it didn’t propel them away from the ice. The rudder didn’t turn the ship, but the tables instead. And for that, the ship paid a steep price.
• The anchors, only 3 of them the day before, now one of thousands of others. Bodies weighted to the bottom of this wet, dark Earth. Anchors made of strangers and friends and lovers.
• “Iceberg dead ahead,” they said. Not the only thing that ended up dead. The bell rang to warn of the danger ahead. “The boat is unsinkable,” they must have misread.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A mistaken promise - a hopeful lie. And to the people that believed it and stepped on board, it was a sentence that sentenced them to die.

So no, no inanimate item belonging to the ship, could ever remotely express the panic. Of what the once living, breathing, passengers felt - on the unsinkable sinking of the Titanic.