2021-07-02 - Convo with Addison (Joseph)
Rumors have been spreading about dreams people have been having of Addison McNeely since her body was found a little over a month ago. There is even a Friendzone group dedicated to "Convos with Addison".
This is Joseph's.
IC Date: 2021-07-02
OOC Date: 2020-09-05
Location: The Open Ocean
Related Scenes: None
Plot: None
Scene Number: 5993
It's supposed to be storming - storm of the century. Today it is not. This boat is supposed to be dry docked safely. But today it is not.
The water is fairly calm. The sun is overhead. The wind blows at a gentle 6 knots. Seagulls are dancing across the sky between the bow and the horizon.
Joseph is at the wheel, of course. The air that hits his face is crisp. This is his boat, his sanctuary. Today is a perfect day for sailing. A perfect day for freedom and to just get one's attention out.
This is his boat, his sanctuary. Except it's not. Not entirely. The proportions are all just a little bit off. The wheel is just a little larger than he knows it to be. And the length of the Surprise is shorter and it is a bit wider. This is the Suprise, but it's not the Surprise.
But there is a surprise when Joseph lifts his eyes to the bow to see he's not alone. There's a young girl with her back to him there in the pulpit, sitting along the headsail. All that can be said about her at the moment is that her hair is long and black and is blown back by the wind as the boat is propelled forward. She is wearing cliché boating attire for a girl consisting of a horizontal striped black and white shirt with three-quarter sleeves and cream shorts. For now her eyes are set off toward the horizon across the bow, but Joseph can't shake the feeling that her attention is riveted on him.
The thing about dreams is that you never remember how you got where you are in them. The beginning is never memorable. You're just there, wherever there is.
And now he's here, in the boat that's really the closest thing he has to a true home. He lived aboard for more than a year, working his way west and south from Savannah, around the Gulf all the way down to Panama....then up the west coast.
Now he's here on an beautiful day in an uncharted sea, hands on the wheel. A hasty glance round takes in the horizon, but then he's focused on his passenger. A passenger that he never had in the real world. It takes him a moment to muster up speech, as if his words were rusty from disuse. "Hey there," he says, finally.
The young woman turns her head and looks over her shoulder down at Joseph. She's 3/4 the length of the boat away but she can make out her features clear and distinct. Straight black hair and soft brown eyes that glitter with delight.
If Joseph has been paying attention to recent events, he may recognize the young woman as the missing girl whose body was recovered some weeks ago after twenty years gone - Addison McNeely.
She waves to the captain and motions for him to come join her.
Those images you see in the papers of the missing. Their yearbook photos or images of summer camp - frozen forever in youth. Somehow unreal.
But here she is, real, as real as one ever is in Dreams. It's enough to make him twinge, a little, with the memory of his own youth. He gazes at her a moment....but then Joe yields to the inevitability that Dreams have. Turns, drops the sea anchor, watches it spread like a parachute under the water. Satisfied he's made at least a nod to safety, he comes forward handily. "Hi," he says, mildly. "I'm Joe." Quite sure they haven't been introduced.
Joseph coming over makes the young woman very happy. Addison's soft brown eyes seem to sparkle when he says his name. He can see now a gold chain around her neck with a pendant that says 'Bunny'.
"Why do you like sailing, Joe?" Her voice is upbeat and the questioning lilt in her voice carries a strong sense of interest in the answer to the question. She's not unlike an enthusiastic child in a museum.
They're alone in the vast blue disc of the sea, where the horizon dissolves mistily into the paler blue of the sky. He settles down beside her with an ease that befits a younger man.
The question earns a long moment of silent consideration, "I love being on the ocean. I love travelling under my own power, in a way humans have for centuries. I love the vastness of it, the absence of traces of people. It's never boring to me, even if it's a long day of blue water."
Addison smiles at Joseph as he speaks. The day and the wind, and the calmness of the ocean, grow more peaceful - if it could even be possible. The young woman is absolutely enamored with Joseph's discussion of the open ocean. Her eyes seem to sparkle and brighten considerably.
"The absence of traces of people?" she prompts with attention riveted. "Like in the dark?"
He's looking at her, now, rather than the ocean. Dreams have their own logic and they tend to do a lot to subsume the feelings of things being strange or nonsensical. Joe knows, in a cerebral sense, that she's dead. He's talking to a ghost or a spirit or an echo or some thing beyond the Veil using her form....but he can't really feel it. It feels natural, as if it makes perfect sense.
"The dark how? Like space? Space feels very similar, though sadly the space I was in did have stuff in it. People leave trash a lot, even in orbit. The vastness of it, though, is even greater. When you get beyond the veil of atmosphere and light pollution and you can see the stars unconcealed...."
There is not a lot of understanding there behind those eager eyes, soft and brown. But there is exhilaration. With every concept he conveys her joy grows. Joseph is clearly the most interesting person she's ever seen and he could talk for hours with her in rapture the entire time.
The blue hue of the sky becomes more vivid. Wisps of clouds become more sharply defined. There is life in this scenery and the world. Life being breathed into it by Joseph's stories.
"You like to be alone...Your name is Thomas." she prompts for some explanation.
He's never created it. Never seen the world of a Dream respond so vividly to him and what he says. "Yes," he says, softly - so visibly startled at her using his first name. Even his beloved rarely does. "I mean, I like people well enough. I have folks I like to be around, but....yeah, I do like solitude."
"Why?" Addison has to ask. She hasn't moved but there is a magnetic sensation there like she must just snap into him if they weren't held apart by physics. Even the water and the birds and the winds seem to hush and await his answer.
Joe hesitates for a long moment, turning the answer over in his mind. "I've always liked the company of my own mind. Liked to be alone with my thoughts and the world. The universe doesn't want anything in particular from me. It's people who do. It's easier to think when I'm by myself, easier to turn over ideas so I can write."
The scenery in that long moment of hesitation did start to fade. The clouds blurred and so did the ocean. The bright sun had dimmed. The sky felt a little washed out. In an instant it all returns to its previous vitality as Joseph explains.
Addison chest rises and falls with deep breaths. It's as if her body can't take the unbridled joy of hearing Joseph speak. She is absolutely enthralled. "Tell me something you've written."
It's not thought, this time, that slows him. It's that perception of things literally hanging on his words, on the conversation they're having. "I wrote a couple of memoirs about my old career at NASA," Joe says...but his gaze isn't on her face. It's roaming the sky, watching the horizon.
In the distance, coming over the horizon, are thick ominous clouds of dark gray and black. The unmistakable haze that can only be the curtain of downpour can be seen. But it's not just off ahead. It's to port, starboard and aft. Still very, very far off.
Addison has closed her eyes and a big smile is on her face. She breaths deep and easy while she listens to him. Her eyes open slow and drift away from his face to the storms coming on the horizon in all directions. "That means I have to leave soon."
She looks back to Joe apologetically, but still enamored and enthralled. "Tell me about NASA."
Now it's the little boat he looks to, but he doesn't get up to tend to all the things he'll need to, to make sure she's battened down and safe for the storms to come. Because he doesn't quite trust himself to keep course to and through that clear patch ahead. Squalls come on fast, sweeping like a scythe over the ocean.
The long face is earnest, as Joe looks back to her. He licks his lips, and smiles, almost shyly. "I was a naval aviator, a fighter pilot off carriers....but I applied to NASA and got into the astronaut corps, about ten years after joining the Navy. When I came in, the Shuttle program was running, so I got a couple flights on Atlantis. Landed her, in fact." A hint of perhaps pardonable pride, there. "And then one long-term expedition on the space station. About six months in orbit. I loved that job," he confesses. "I genuinely think I got to do one of the most amazing jobs in the history of humanity. There's nothing like seeing the Earth from space."
Joseph's story brings brightness to the scene. The air smells more crisp. The ocean is bluer, as is the sky. The wind feels more like wind. Addison absolutely beams. She might burst entirely and shoot light from her fingers, such is the difficulty she has keeping it all contained.
But the clouds don't abate. They have moved closer.
"They're coming, Joe. We have to leave." Addison says quietly. "It's easy for you. All you have to do is wake up."
She smiles, and then she's gone. It's all gone. And Joe awakens where he would expect to.
"I know," he tells her. And he does know, on so many levels. Already rising to go back to the helm, even as she tells him all he has to do is wake up. "Wher-" The question's cut off by the dream's cessation.
He wakes on the couch of the cabin where his lover and his lover live, nearly thrashing his way on to the floor. Not panicked, but urgent. As if he had to rise and warn them. Only to find that he's safe (as safe as anyone ever is in Gray Harbor). Joe sits up, slowly, hand over his heart, as if to slow its beating
Tags: addisonconvo