That I have hoisted my sail to all the winds – it’s the plan I always had – to get to the sea, to get to the sky and to get away from all this. But the sails on this boat, and my will, should be just enough with fuel and muscle and a little cash to get away.

But who has fuel any more, who has cash. Muscle is no problem, but fuel and cash for the journey – hoisting the sail isn’t done by will alone but by planning and backing and bribing and scheming. 

All the compromises that make up a life, that make up the journey from mama’s teat to the last breath, the last swallow, the last look – surely my bootstraps. But no, there is no individual initiative, no matter what the history books say. You do the work and you get the blisters and someone always looks at you and says, ‘No, you’ll always be Thing X, no matter how many Things Y you think you can achieve. Unless I give the nod, unless I say the word, all your initiative, all the sacks and rope, all the lumber you can carry, all the nails you can bend – all those things are mine alone.’ 

And so I hoist and hoist for some other bastard, who is obviously more legitimate than me – he can show titles going back centuries and all I have is a birth certificate with empty spaces and a few coins and skills all the aristocracy together couldn’t muster – skills developed one by one over decades of putting all the pieces together and putting all those pieces to work and even the overseers can’t budge me, now matter their job descriptions and sidearms and so, I go down to the shipyard, survey the work of the other hands, the gleaming hulls, paid for by who knows what, and I look at all the ships, all lined up and I look at the guard towers and the gunners guarding the ships of the wealthy and the ships of the government and wonder if all my ingenuity, all my work, all my skill will get me past them.

I read through the settlement documents again, seated in the long conference room across from my former business partner and his lawyer and next to my own. Dissolving a partnership of eleven years and we could barely speak to one another. The words all flowed into ant-like rows of nothingness and I had to focus on one line at a time to make sure I comprehended.

That’s the trouble with legalese. Though individual lines don’t give whole pieces of information, we were seated in silence so that we could read and ask questions and so tried to make sense of it all. To be honest, the dissolution was only about four pages long and two of those were definitions and one was intentionally left blank, so subtracting the half page at the top of the first which was the name and place of our actions and the half page at the back that was for all of our signature, the thing was only ten pages that I had to comprehend, but I could only focus on individual words.

The line said ‘nor lose possession’ and I figured that part I should focus on. That phrase ‘possession is nine tenths of the law’ came to mind, and I tried not to let it distract me. Nor lose possession of the fair,’ what the fair Rosamund, the fairest of the seasons, Vanity Fair. No, nothing so interesting. Neither party loses possession fo that fair representation in the courts, something like that. The ants started to spiral into the shape of a Ferris Wheel and my mind narrowed. My vision narrowed, and the ringing in my ears resolved to the sound of a carnival band and my lawyer, bless her, nearly shouted in my ear. I thought before the words resolved that she was going to shout, ‘Come see the bearded lady, no visit to the fair is complete without a visit to the freak show!’ Please focus, Cory, you’re paying by the hour and that’s not much time left.

And I resolved to focus and to shake the fair out of my mind. My lawyer called for the secretary to bring more coffee and water and then asked me where I needed help. I looked at her hand, her eyes narrowed – her pupils narrowed like a reptile’s and her hair seemed to have its own life and her voice was suddenly not that of the lawyer I’d consulted six weeks before, but of the harshest judge from my nightmare.

Possession is nine tenths of your attorney, too.