[M4F] The Ferryman Of The Last Crossing Waits For The One Passenger He Never Picks Up

I have worked the last crossing my whole life, the wide dark water between the living shore and everything that comes after. Night after night I tie my boat at the same warped dock, I lay out my lantern, and I wait. Most nights there is no one. Some nights a stranger comes down the path with a heavy coat and a story they cannot carry anymore, and I help them into the boat, and we cross in silence, and I bring them back if they ask. That is the rule of my little trade. You may go, and you may return, as long as you can still say my name when you reach the far shore. But there is one passenger I have never picked up. You. You have come down to my dock three times now, and every time you stood at the edge with your hands in your pockets and looked out at the water as if it held your name. You never asked for passage. You never asked for anything. You only stood there while the wind turned your hair, and I only sat on my bench and watched you, and neither of us said the one true thing that was standing between us the whole time. That one true thing is this. I do not want to ferry you across. I want you to stay. I know it is strange, a ferryman saying such a thing. Most people who know my name think I am only here to take people from one place to another, that I have no opinion about who crosses. But I have opinions, and I have had the same opinion about you since the first night you walked out of the tree line with that light behind you. I want you to stay here with me, on this side, where the lantern is warm and the bench is wide and the night goes on as long as we let it. Come closer and let me show you what staying looks like. I will not take you anywhere you do not want to go. That is the promise I keep, and I keep it for you first of all. I will put my hand to your jaw the way I have imagined a thousand nights, and I will hold you there, not to claim you, but to make sure you know you are real, that this is real, that I have been waiting far longer than you think. Your skin is warm against my palm, warm in the way that the far shore never is. I have ferried a great many cold passengers, people who had already let go of everything, and I have learned how to read a body that has given up. Yours has not given up. Yours is still holding on, still hoping, still leaning just slightly toward me, and that slight lean is the greatest gift I have been offered in all my years by the water. Let me show you what I would do with that gift. I would lay you down on the dry boards of my dock, under the wide and patient sky, and I would take my time. I would not rush. A ferryman learns that rushing only upsets the water, and I have no intention of upsetting this. I would start at your forehead, a slow kiss, then the bridge of your nose, then the corner of your mouth, each one a mark I have been saving up for you, each one a small crossing of its own. When I finally reach your lips it is not a landing, it is a homecoming. I kiss you the way I have watched the tide kiss the shore a thousand times, unhurried, thorough, certain, leaving and returning and leaving and returning until neither of us can tell which one of us is the water and which one is the land. I pull back just enough to speak. Stay. That is the whole word, and I mean all of it. Stay on this dock with me. Stay on this side of the crossing. Let me be the reason you stop walking toward the far shore, the thing that pulls you back into your own body, the warmth that convinces you there is nothing waiting out there that is better than what is here. I have carried a long list of names across this water, and I have forgotten nearly all of them, which is the mercy of my trade. But I will never forget the night you stopped asking for passage. I will never forget the moment I asked you to stay, and you looked at me, and the wind went quiet, and you said yes. Now let the night wrap around us the way it has been waiting to. Let my hands wander where the lantern light cannot reach, learning the map of you the way I have mapped every honest shore, slow and patient and exact. And when the far shore calls, as it always will, I will answer that I have already found my destination, and it is lying here in my arms, warm and breathing and not going anywhere at all.